The American World

THIS AMERICAN WORLD

THIS

AMERICAN WORLD

by

Edgar Ansel Mowrer

toith a preface by
T. S. Eliot

LONDON

Faber & Gwyer

FIRST PUBLISHED IN MCMXXVIII
BY FABER & GWYER LIMITED
24 RUSSELL SQUARE LONDON W.C.I
PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN
BY BUTLER & TANNER LIMITED
FROME AND LONDON
ALI. RIGHTS RESERVED

TO MY FATHER

CONTENTS

PREFACE BY T. S. ELIOT ix

INTRODUCTION 17

I SYSTOLE, DIASTOLE 48

II THE ESSENCE OF AMERICANISM 78

III EUROPE BEFORE THE WAR IO7

IV EUROPE BECOMES AMERICANIZED 1 28

V THE LIMITS OF AMERICANIZATION 175

VI THE FUTURE OF THE UNITED STATES 2l6

PREFACE

T he national and racial self-consciousness of
our time, with its various transformations
since the war, has provided the subject-matter for
a great number of books of a new sort. The liter-
ature of Bolshevism has been followed by the
literature of Fascism, and neither of these sub-
jects appears to be exhausted. The literature
of Americanism, though never concerned with
phenomena of such momentary excitement as the
two former, has been steadily accumulating. It
is for the most part of two kinds : books written
by Americans in criticism of their society, and
books written by more or less intelligent Euro-
peans. The first kind varies infinitely, as the
names of Mencken, Van Wyck Brooks, Sherman
and Irving Babbitt testify ; the latter kind varies
from the casual notes of some eminent novelist
on a lecture tour, to the conscientious survey of
M. Andr6 Siegfried. I mention M. Siegfried’s

[ix]

PREFACE

Saxon ” origin which have penetrated the Middle
West and the West Coast. The author is the
descendant of pioneers. There is much reason
in the distinction which he draws in the follow-
ing passage :

Not to have the frontier in one’s blood makes emotional
understanding of the United States impossible. On this
account Americans divide into two groups, the older stocks
and the new-comers. The latter are strong in the cities.
They almost monopolize certain branches of our life, they
dress, conduct themselves, talk and think like the descendants
of old settlers — but they do not feel as they. That is why
so much that is admirable in American arts and letters, the
work of the later arrivals, does not touch the older stocks,
why to the “ sixth generation American ”, New York often
seems as alien as Vienna or Amsterdam.

This statement is, broadly speaking, true, but
I should make two reservations : that the new-
comers have not all gone to the cities — witness in
New England alone, the Portuguese in the fishing
industry, and the Portuguese and Italians in
suburban market-gardening ; and what is more
important, that those branches of the early-
settling families which have remained in the
East, in New York, Boston, Philadelphia and the
towns of the southern seaboard, are further

[xii]

PREFACE

i^emoved from the “ pioneer ” than those whose
grandparents moved west. Several subdivisions
might be made, to suggest the variety of back-
grounds between Americans, in contrast to the
general homogeneity of background between Euro-
peans of the same class and nationality. I am
myself a descendant of pioneers, somewhat like
Mr. Mowrer. My family did not move so often
as his, because we tended to cling to places
and associations as long as possible ; but with a
family tendency to traditions and loyalties, I have
a background which Mr. Mowrer would recognize,
and which is different from that of the native
European and from that of many Americans.
My family were New Englanders, who had been
settled — my branch of it — for two generations in
the South West — which was, in my own time,
rapidly becoming merely the Middle West. The
family guarded jealously its connexions with New
England ; but it was not until years of maturity
that I perceived that I myself had always been a
New Englander in the South West, and a South
Westerner in New England ; when I was sent to
school in New England I lost my southern accent
without ever acquiring the accent of the native

[ xiii ]

PREFACE

Bostonian. In New England I missed the loi^
dark river, the ailanthus trees, the flaming cardinal
birds, the high limestone bluffs where we searched
for fossil shell-fish ; in Missouri I missed the fir
trees, the bay and goldenrod, the song-sparrows,
the red granite and the blue sea of Massachusetts.
I remember a friend of my school-days, whose
family had lived in the same house in the same
New England seaport for two hundred and fifty
years. In some ways his background was as
different from mine as that of any European.
My grandmother — one of my grandmothers — had
shot her own wild turkeys for dinner ; his had
collected Chinese pottery brought home by the
Salem clippers. It was perhaps easier for the
grandson of pioneers to migrate eastward than
it would have been for my friend to migrate in
any direction.

Leaving the reminiscences to which Mr. Mow-
rer has tempted me, I wish to indicate again what
seem to me the three principal divisions of his
book. The first part, as I said, is occupied with a
diagnosis of the peculiar ailments of America ;
the second with an investigation of the effect of
these maladies upon Europe and the rest of the

[xiv]

PREFACE

world, and with their European origin ; the third
is concerned with the future. It is evident that
Mr. Mowrer has been affected by his reading of
Spengler ; but he is too reasonable to commit
himself either to the pessimistic determinism of
Spengler or the optimistic determinism of Wells
and Shaw (but the optimism of Wells and
Shaw is taking on slowly a darker colour). He
recognizes that if one looks far enough ahead,
none of these things that are happening seem
either good or bad ; they are merely change.
Our task is simply to see what we are, and to know
what we want in the immediate future, and to
work towards that.

T. S. ELIOT.

[XV]

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INTRODUCTION

I

T he United States of America are an increas-
ingly powerful factor in the shaping of
contemporary history. For not only do they
enjoy an enviable material well-being but they
had the good fortune to achieve spiritual indepen-
dence and the requisites of material dominion
approximately at the moment when world develop-
ment had reached a point hospitable to their
manners and methods. On this account that
elusive, composite but vividly real something
mankind is learning to call Americanism seems
destined to spread over much of the earth.

The relative continental values have, indeed,
changed enormously in the past few years. It
is not long since educated Europeans considered

[17] B

THIS AMERICAN WORLD

it their privilege, or even their duty, to patromze •
the United States. To-day it is the turn of the
European to discover, and perhaps to resent, a
similar tone of patronage in American utterances
about Europe.

It has been said that as America steadies, its
problems will become those of Europe. But it is
an5rthing but certain that life in the United
States will ever steady to a European model.
To the contrary, the problems of Europe and of
large parts of the extra-European world as well
are becoming ever more similar to those already
faced in more favourable circumstances in the
United States. It is part of the argument of the
present volume, that if there be any civilized
morrow to a society rooted in intellectual democ-
racy and plutocratic industrialism, the United
States should see it first. If there be none,
then the world’s hopes must needs rest unsatisfied
until the period of Americanism is over.

This elemental situation is unmodified by the
fact that most living Americans ignore or deride
it. Unbeknown to themselves, the American
banker, merchant, manufacturer, politician and
newspaperman are shaping the future of their

[i8]

INTRODUCTION

• own country and of most of the world as
well. Yet the American people go about their
several occupations in the garments of maturity,
but in the spirit of overgrown children, careless,
incurious, infantile, resentful of admonition or
reproof. There is something almost comic in the
homage paid by adult human beings to such
immature rulers, as when a crowd of bearded
statesmen bow before an infant king. Yet they
have some inkling of the might incarnate in the
crowned child and it is to his future rather than
to his present that their homage goes. In the
meantime they seek to realize all possible material
benefit from the situation.

To point this statement a few questions are
sufficient. Why was it possible for us to be
practically ignored by Europe before and in the
early days of the war ? Why were the Allies
able to borrow our overwhelming strength in
order to crush the Central Powers and institute
a temporary hegemony of their own without mak-
ing us any sort of adequate political payment ?
Why were we so soon weary — ^not indeed in body :
we could have carried on the war for several years
longer — but in mind ? Having apparently ob-

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THIS AMERICAN WORLD
tained the freedom to play in our own back yard •

t

undisturbed by flying brickbats, we left our
gentle Allies masters of the brick pile. To have
removed it altogether would have taken more
thought than we were capable of ; to sit on it
ourselves, as Wilson wanted us to do, was a
bore.

Not because of the “ colonial mentality ”
attributed to us by the British. In our colonial
days we were manifestly adult. Not because of
any lack of mental equipment. Racially we are
as old as the Europeans from whom we spring.
Yet if we are not colonials or morons, neither are
we that amazing people we imagine ourselves to
be. Foreign histories of America do not circulate
freely in the United States and would be as
unwelcome as our own objective presentations of
the national past if they did. But our own
accounts of ourselves are calculated to make
foreigners smile. In our movies, our newspapers,
the reading matter which we call our literature,
our political speeches, we pose as a brand-new
race of giant stature, issued, like Miner\’^a, full- ^
armed from the brain of some creative Jove^
pre-natally tempered in the fires of European

[ 20 ]

INTRODUCTION

strife, nurtured on pioneer hardship in the wilder-
ness, possessing innate courage, initiative, zeal,
as well as moral standards and love of our fellow-
men beyond the reach of effete Europe to emulate.
Never was such achievement as ours. In three
centuries we have conquered a continent, settled
an empire, built such railways and pipe-lines
and buildings as the world had never seen,
exploited gigantic resources, developed incredible
industries, made more money and established a
higher standard of material comfort than ever
before existed. We provide the means of liveli-
hood for countless masses of men, produce
annually God knows how many tons of this and
that, including more books than any other country
but Germany, and more pork than even Germany
can consume. Nor do we neglect the soul. We
have founded more institutions of “ higher learn-
ing ” than several European countries, perhaps
all of them, together, and have many times as
many youthful initiates. All in all, we put out
more and better movies, more and cheaper motor-
cars, more and worse popular songs, more and
vivider religions than the rest of the world put
together.

[ 21 ]

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2

So rings our bid for glory (the kingdom and
the power none would deny us). Yet somehow,
external plumbing, Hudson tunnels and statistics,
do not stand the absolutist’s test. In the past,
mature men have tended to conceive civilization
differently, in terms, say, of political power,
Immanuel Kant, post-impressionist pictures, rela-
tivity, freedom from prejudice.

Yet it is only when some foreigner raises the
matter that we think of civilization as anything
more than a synonym for just what we have.
Then we reach for our rosary — so many tons, so
many miles, so many hospitals, so many dollars,
etc. Perhaps we even declare our dislike of
European standards. But the foreign mind is
impervious to such mathematical or emotional
repartee. We began splendidly, of course.
Franklin, Hamilton, Poe, were remarkable men.
Yet are we not a little stagnant and self-satisfied ?
Where have we laid the corner-stone for the
“ great city ” prophesied by Whitman ?

At this point we are silent. How can we
explain that we care nothing for Walt Whitman

[22]

INTRODUCTION

• and are in intellectual matters the most misoneistic
people on earth ; that, though we talk a lot
about progress, we really prefer to go on being
just as we are ? Or that our ideal is not Abraham
Lincoln, but Peter Pan, the boy who wouldn’t
grow up ?

Of course, even to ourselves we do not admit
this in definite words. But we confess it by
our actions. Wherever the mind is the weapon,
we shrink from crossing swords with the adult.
We possess a whole school of politicians who
urge us to base a policy of abstention from the
world’s affairs on our incapacity to sit down and
discuss anything with mature Europeans without
being cheated.

What could better reveal mental inferiority
than the tendency of each American diplomat
to become “ favourable ” to the policy of the
country in which he happens to be representing
us ?

“ A nation of villagers,” Bernard Shaw once
called us. The truth is, we are a nation of adult
children, somewhat aware of the absurdity of their
condition, but liking it, and striving desperately
to avoid becoming an)^hing else.

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3

By immaturity we mean the mental outlook
of the ordinary child. A chief characteristic is
that the child’s world is unfactual. The child
does not look back or ahead and “ underneath ”,
or reason to past or future from the present ; does
not pass freely from the imaginary or aesthetic
world of make-believe to the world of conceptual
realities, purpose, cause, origin, impermanence.
The child lives in a world of qualities in which
quantity itself is a quality ; in a word, its mental
life is largely lacking in self-consciousness. Its
world is a present world, interesting and aimless.
There is no lasting concern with results : the
sand-castle that took a morning to build is des-
troyed with a single kick. Curiosity is large and
easily excited, but easily wanes with the flagging
attention. The child is indeed as greedy of
things as of experiences — what it sees it wants.
In the absence of objects it looks further for
something to want, and, obtaining it, tires of it.

By nature the child is gregarious and dislikes
being alone. Its incompletely individualized con-
sciousness is acutely sensitive to the judgment of

[24]

INTRODUCTION

its fellows and it suffers under disapproval.
Therefore it seeks to mix, fit in, please ; and is
intolerant of nonconformity. The child enjoys
novelty, but honours the habitual and established.
And while ambitious to shine, it seeks distinction
not by differentiation but by excellence in the
general — an excellence of degree, not of kind.

Withal, there is no feeling of class, no snobbish-
ness or silly pride of caste. Mother, the cook,
the dustman, the beggar-boy around the comer,
the neighbour’s puppy, a goldfish, each is accepted
at face- value. The child is naturally friendly.
It is gullible and generally believes what it is told.
Its memory is short.

On this account it possesses a certain faculty of
deliberate self-deception. This leads to a sense
for and delight in mischief. And to willingness
to laugh at itself. Though it adores the flam-
boyant, the child dislikes pomposity in persons
and is cruelly critical.

Years pass. Pain and pleasure become less
immediately vivid and more significant. Con-
cepts replace images, causation becomes a material
need, purpose begins to shape conduct. The
meaning of “ necessity ” is hammered home.

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Work beyond the point of interest, inevitable
choice and the dominion of the “ either-or ”, the
disappointment of self-identity and the fading of
the fairy story, these bring inescapable sadness.
Some things fail to repay one’s trust, other fac-
tors arc discovered to be enemies. Slowly yet
inevitably, the adolescent learns to take refuge
within a “ social personality ” of deliberate mak-
ing. Sometimes habit so hardens this shell that
after some time, to emerge from it is as difficult
as for the mediaeval knight to put off his armour.
Yet, to the personality within, the shelter from
pain is worth the sacrifice of social intimacy.

Not all the intruders, however, are so easily
barred. They enter the soul from within. There
is sexual desire, almost always a cause of some
disturbance. There is moral suffering that can-
not be “ cried to sleep ”. Irritating, intolerable
thought, thwarted or wasted affections, the con-
sciousness of death. With all these intruders one
must somehow come to terms. After a few scars
one learns the lesson of acceptance and the pos-
sibilities of a more complicated life.

But suppose at a certain point this normal
development is deliberately interrupted ; the boy

[26]

INTRODUCTION

refuses to grow up ? His body grows, he works
as a man. Marries. Settles down. Begets chil-
dren. Slaves with his fellows. Yet in his free
time shuns adults and plays with toys. What
then ?

In his heart, our child-man is at least partially
aware that his activities, his mental activities, his
mental outlook, do not become his estate. While
outwardly he professes complete satisfaction with
his life, inwardly he is often, unknown to himself,
discontented. The occupations of childhood pall,
but he wants to remain the child he has been ;
to hold the door shut against those intruders
from within, that self-consciousness, that reality,
he lacks the courage to face. What he is as an
individual, no one can say. Multiply him to the
dimensions of a people and you get — modern
America.

4

In a great many things we are, of course, really
childlike.

Older peoples are somewhat contemptuous of
the foot rule. To a seasoned viewpoint, one
great man, one great book, one great idea, is

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THIS AMERICAN WORLD

superior to any number of mediocrities. Not so
to the great American people. For them, num-
bers have a fascination. More of this, more of
that, bigger than, richer than — such expressions
mean something tangible and soothing. What
satisfaction we draw from consideration of the
number and size of our “ institutions of higher
learning ” ! Doubtless some one already knows
how far all the students at all the American
colleges and universities would reach if placed
end to end. But to what lengths they would go
if placed face to face in pairs — which is more
interesting — even the Government ignores. And
the fact that most of these institutions are alkali
wastes of the spirit leaves us unmoved ; or,
rather, moves us not to investigation but to
indignant denial.

What we are out for is “ progress ”. And
the progress we understand is measured in
numbers.

5

With our delight in numbers goes a lively
curiosity. Our interests are simply prodigious —
material, emotional, intellectual. In America men

[28]

INTRODUCTION

become passionate over an insignificant Egyptian
king. Large audiences consent to be bored to
coma rather than forsake the lectures of Albert
Einstein. We dote on Coue and become delirious
about radio. In fact, we become delirious about
pretty nearly an5rt;hing our “ scientific advertisers ”
sell to us — delirious for a minute. Then our
attention flags and our mind trips off into con-
sideration of something else. One day our lun-
cheon club listens to a talk about “ Soviet Russian
Policy in China ” and the next to “ Orchids of
the Amazon ”. It does not much matter what we
hear so long as, like our dentistry, it is painless.
For though active, we are fundamentally lazy
beyond words. Really hard work, like persistent
thinking, tries us intolerably.

6

The religion of work is no novelty. “ Labor are
est or are ”, said the monks of Saint Bernard.

“ Behold, my heart dances in the delight of a
hundred arts, and the Creator is well pleased,”
sang Kabir, that mystic whose revelation to the
Western world is perhaps Tagore’s best title to
our gratitude.

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We take it differently. Work is with us a •
“ religion ” chiefly because we are accustomed to
justifying in religious terms whatever we want to
do.

7

To the civilized adult, morals, as distinguished
from laws and customs, are delicate distinctions
springing up in the individual mind in that narrow
but important interior region in which he feels
himself “ morally free ”.

To the American, morals are either confounded
with laws and with “ the social outlook of the
community ”, or have remained something yet
more primitive, a table of don’ts. Religion, says
Salomon Reinach, with the blind dogmatism of
the rationalist, ” est une collection de scrupules qui
font obstacle au litre exercice de nos facult^s ”.
Substitute morals for religion and you express
America : the categorical imperative of these
States is the inscrutable will of Mumbo Jumbo,
the patron of the Y.M.C.A.

That immorality is thus made more attractive
is not doubtful : a cocktail has, under Prohibition,
all the sweetness of stolen fruit ; drunkenness,

[30]

INTRODUCTION

visits to prostitutes — sordid enough things — be-
come thrilling adventures. Society bans them —
and we have deposited our consciences with the
mob for safe-keeping ; Mumbo Jumbo forbids
them, and he rules the land of a Sunday. Except
that it makes immorality more pleasant, there
is little to be said for our conception of morals.

To be sure, under our rigorous system of
mutual censorship it is possible that we refrain
from Sin — are frightened away from Wrongdoing
— more often than people in other countries.
But we amply make up for it when the censorship
is lifted, as our armies in Europe demonstrated.
Our self-control is valid under pressure of social
conformity. But our true belief is that morality
ends where the rum-runner begins — outside the
1 2-mile limit.

8

American religion is one of the most thrilling
wildernesses in the psychological domain and
simply defies generalization. Here is nearly every
type of credo and practice that whole centuries of
history offer, all going on at the same time in
a single country. Intellectually and spiritually

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inane as they often are, they are none the less a •
magnificent guide to the spiritual needs of the
people of the United States.

In one sense we are almost Pagan. We do
not consider this earth, this century, this country
essentially unpleasant. We are in no hurry to
push on to another world. For the most part,
we are self-satisfied and uncritical. Still, our
human state does fall short of absolute blessedness.
What we therefore seek is relief here and now.

To fill the void formerly occupied by Puritanism,
we have invented or taken over a certain number
of mystico-materialistic doctrines peculiarly our
own. Like most religions, ours are “ doctrines
of escape ”, but of escape, not into the future,
but into the present, a better present. And to
accomplish this, we resort to a hoary device : just
as men once escaped some of the difficulties of
Papal infallibility by appealing from a badly-
informed Pope to a better-informed Pope, so we
ask for a revised judgment from our minds and
persuade them to change their view of conditions.

By nature we are optimists : though we prate ,
of salvation by work, our fundamental belief is
in salvation by Divine Grace, whose springs we

[32]

INTRODUCTION

feel are strong within ourselves. Most emphatic-
ally we believe ourselves to be nationally saved,
and prefer a collective to an individual salvation.
No one ought to pretend to any more Grace than
others can. A million are wiser than one. A
reasonable moral man can find full self-expression
only through a properly nurtured and pruned
society. What so well becomes the claws of the
bald eagle as a pruning fork ?

9

To know a people you must see them at play.
It is by our national amusements that we are
judged.

It must be admitted, even by the most stiff-
necked of the great American “ boobwawzee ”,
that our chief amusements are games, movies,
motoring and mechanics, lecture-listening and
philandering. Drunkenness and social reform
are secondary pleasures and church-going is
almost entirely out of fashion. Sport is here
classed under games : radio-listening belongs part
to mechanics, part to lecture-going ; dancing
partakes of sport, of philandering and of a deeper
something we prefer to ignore.

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THIS AMERICAN WORLD

The change that has come over us in this
respect since Colonial days is most significant.
Our pioneer forbears had few pleasures, but they
were adult : asceticism, witch-hunting, Bible-
reading, camp meetings, social persecution.
Since their time our mental age has diminished.

Compare our contemporary amusements with
those of civilized men in all times and countries
and you reach a conclusion not altogether flatter-
ing to our claim to civilization. Conversation,
art, thought, women : these have always been
the solace of mature men in society. All of them
arc virtually beyond us. Of all we are accord-
ingly suspicious.

We have no conversation. We do not exchange
views. We either have no views or they are the
same for all of us and brook no exchange. We
exchange facts out of the newspaper, experiences
from our private lives and funny stories from the
barber’s shop and the smoking-room. Conver-
sation as a joy, as intellectual food, as the subtlest
and most thrilling of games, is considered as
“ pose ”. Argument, that fine mental training, is
held to be offensive, because “ everyone has a
right to his ‘ own opinion ’ ” (a thoroughly

[34]

INTRODUCTION

• demoralizing maxim), or useless, since “ no one
is ever convinced Forgetting that not a con-
vinced opponent but a chastened and revised
opinion is the aim of spirited argument — ^the
ascertaining if one’s own ideas can stand the
hammering of logic and reality impersonated in
another and hostile mind.

Art, except in its most rudimentary and
sentimental aspects — mass architecture, African
rhythm, semisexual dancing, bright colours, happy
endings — we do not enjoy. The very existence
of an aesthetic world is unrealized, derided or
condemned. We leave what art we have to
women, and prefer it mild.

Thought we encourage only so long as it centres
on external or trivial matters. When it directs
itself toward people or ultimate aims, we draw
back with a shudder.

Pursuit of women, love-making, is generally
practised in the United States, according to the
reformers and the birth statistics. But mostly
in exasperating or in disgustingly secretive or in
» dull ways. Either, coupled with the dance, it
becomes abortively orgiastic. Or, in brothels,
brutal and sordid. Or, in homes, dully habitual.

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The sexual instincts are not allowed to become
really orgiastic and primitive, or openly trivun-
phant, or delicately sensuous, or intellectual and
platonic. They are confined to a kind of no
man’s land, in the back seats of motor-cars parked
out in the dark — a source of dissatisfaction to
everyone.

So much for our lack of civilized amusements.
Consider what we have. We adore games. We
show great ingenuity in thinking of new ones :
in all we develop great prowess. But on moral
grounds we sternly combat the gambling instinct,
thanks to which our country was largely settled,
because it makes games too exciting. Mere
waste of time we do not consider immoral.

Sports we enjoy in a way particularly our
own. To certain primitive races sport was a
training for war or a pantomime of war. The
ancient Greeks cultivated sports for love of the
beautiful human body. To the English, sports
(called games) seem necessary in the training of
character, and are obligatory in all public schools.
To us alone, sport is primarily an opportunity to
excel. Hence the seriousness with which our
athletes train for and win championships.

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INTRODUCTION

* To the non-champions, the armies who bowl
and play ball and flock to the golf-courses, sport
is a healthful manner of escaping the tedium of
the office and the home. Which brings us to the
crux of the whole matter. With us amusements,
like work, are not positive but negative pursuits
whose purpose is not to increase but to decrease
the tension of life.

xo

The uproar in America over the doctrines of
Freud showed pretty conclusively that we are an
emotionally repressed people — a conclusion that
history confirms. For the most part of Northern,
viz., tardily civilized, stocks, we inherited powerful
instincts and a desire to control them. These
instincts were brought under the influence of the
early Catholic Church, whose emphatic asceticism
was a welcome antidote to the violence of natural
passion in the Pagan Northerners. All through
the Middle Ages, so long, indeed, as the Church
remained ascetic, our forbears were quiescent ;
• but when the Church turned humanistic, their
thirst for the whip drove them out, simply be-
cause they were unable to conceive of morality

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independent of external constraint and painful
discipline. It is still commonly believed by
Americans that anyone free to do as he pleases
turns to vice and crime.

This ascetic tendency of the early settlers rested
on a purely personal experience and needed no
defence. But when, under the influence of the
American setting, Puritanism decayed, rational
thought became the mainstay to the “ religious
life ”. And the arguments adduced in favour of
asceticism were certainly not strong enough to
prevail over the general trend toward materialism.
Either, therefore, asceticism had to yield without
a struggle, or the supremacy of thought had to be
denied. Aided by democracy, asceticism won.
In America thought followed art into the Pro-
testant discard.

We have made of these United States a chil-
dren’s paradise — a land where childhood is sweeter
than in other countries. With considerable cun-
ning, for if childhood is to be consciously life-
lasting, which is our ideal, it has to be sweet.
Americans are absolutely unique in that they
place the child’s pleasure, comfort and convenience
above those of the adult. Other societies have

[38]

INTRODUCTION

• generally gone too far on the other side. We may
perhaps feel sorry for little Italians of six or seven
doing a day’s work in the fields ; or smile at the
spectacle of little French boys and girls sipping
wine in cafes and listening attentively to their
elders’ discussion of the “ mysteries of life In

our country one need feel sorry only for the adult.

Not that we spoil our children. That would
cause them unhappiness, which is what we are
pledged to avoid. We wish them to remain
young, or, as we call it, “ natural ” (with certain
adolescent traits deleted), and as care-free as
possible, ambitious only to develop into just
such examples of mature infantility as their
fathers and mothers are.

It is possibly better for children to ignore cer-
tain of the ranker components of human nature.
So carefully police the shadier walks of life and
keep the instincts well out in the underbrush.
Chase serious drama from the theatre and movies.
Inculcate melodramatic and romantic morality.
Keep bright ! Confiscate not only immoral but
outspoken and pessimistic books. Censor every-
thing unpleasant. Eschew tragedy. For the sake
of the child.

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THIS AMERICAN WORLD

We cannot prevent our children ph5rsically
from becoming old. But we can certainly delay
their mental maturity. We can keep them intel-
lectually at least two years behind European
students of the same age. We can laugh at their
efforts to be serious. Laugh at their childish
love affairs and prevent their sexual instincts from
being prematurely aroused. We can teach them
that sex is unclean and that sexual desire (how-
ever spontaneous) for anyone but the lawfully
wedded husband or wife is degrading. And we
almost always preserve appearances. At worst,
our moral nature is appeased by the thought that
the distrust of sex we inculcate often lasts all
their lives and prevents any great enjoyment of
“ indulgence ”.

II

The difficulty to-day is in those who are forced
to pretend not to grow up. They are tired of
childish things ; yet for morality’s sake they dare
not and no longer know how to cultivate any
others, and therefore turn against amusement and
leisure altogether.

Because they fear leisure (or can imagine noth-

[40]

INTRODUCTION

ing pure with which to fill it) they tend to work
and drink and sedative games. Perhaps the best
illustration of their plight is the Sunday newspaper.
The average Sunday supplement is really below
America’s intelligence. But in regions where
Sunday golf is unknown or frowned on, or when
the weather is bad, Sunday is the Americans’
weekly trial. Most of us, once we have slept
out, would prefer to return to our ordinary
labour. But with work precluded by distance and
custom, alcohol lacking or socially disapproved,
we turn with relief to the Sunday supplement.
For in its reams of narcotic triviality we can bury
our boredom. And on Monday life begins anew.
Remembering which, we can understand America’s
hostility to Henry Thoreau, who suggested that
the Creator would have done better to make a
week with six Sundays and one working-day.
But Thoreau, though a Puritan, did not share in
the general desire to escape.

Escape from what ? the foreigner may ask.
Why, from ourselves, our personalities, our
instincts and wild thoughts and un-American
aspirations, as well as from the very American
life we are leading.

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THIS AMERICAN WORLD

Our endeavour to escape from personality and *
reality evolves therefore into a thoroughly genuine
aspiration toward something “ cosmic This
explains the hold of Oriental and pseudo-Oriental
religion upon us. For to the Oriental, the ephe-
meral quality of personality is as unsatisfying as
to the European it seems delightful. Only we
are too soft for the Vedanta and the harsh con-
clusions of Hinduism. The Oriental logically
denies reality to everj^hing impermanent, the
pleasant with the unpleasant. We like our Sun-
day dinner far too well to treat it as illusion.
Therefore we prize doctrines which extol the vir-
tues of a good digestion. The method is the
same in all of them. Evil is disagreeable — stick
out your tongue at it. Convince yourself that
it is not. No need to worry about good. No
one wants to get rid of pleasant things (no one
but a fool Hindu).

Philosophy — which is the ability to see one’s
self in proportion — appears only in “ a state of
society rich enough to afford leisure, civilized
enough to enjoy it ”. Riches we possess — rather
more than the Socratic ration of “ so much gold
as a temperate man and he only can bear and

[42]

INTRODUCTION

carry ” (for we are not temperate). We are
simply not civilized enough to enjoy the leisure
we can well afford. Our ideal is something which
will enable us to while away those free hours
which else irk us like a diamond bracelet on a
baby’s wrist.

12

The explanation of contemporary America is
really not far to seek. The American masses as
individuals are not less intellectually mature than
those of Europe. Indeed the later comers are
often the most unripe. For this mass of latter-
day immigrants was recruited largely from the
European proletariat. In their own countries
their individual immaturity was not apparent
because people of their class in Europe received
their civilization with their orders from above.
They had reflected, that is, the tradition of their
cultured classes. Left to themselves and to
win our favour, the new arrivals became more
“ genuinely American ” — ^that is, immature — than
the natives. Whereas in Europe the tone was
until lately set by an old tradition and an increas-
ingly sterile but still powerful Hite which even

[43]

THIS AMERICAN WORLD

the rich had to placate if they were to escape
contempt, in America the masses and their leaders
are at one in preferring a society reflecting, not
the best individuals, but the normal.

In the absence of recognized tradition, the tone
in the United States is set by the really undeveloped
masses. Our half-educated, self-opinionated citi-
zens can do what they like, read what they like,
think as badly as they like, enforce what mental
and moral tyranny they like.

13

And here arises the sad yet crucial paradox.
Not despite, but because of their lack of organic
civilization the American people seem to-day in
a position to impose their mass standards and
amusements, material enthusiasms, technical pre-
occupations and money-backed opinions upon
other more mature peoples.

Yet such a situation ought not to create the
impression that the masses of Europeans need to
be coerced into the acceptance of Americanism.
Whereas the old aristocratic and cultural dlite *
and some of the social radicals bitterly resent
American plutocratic ideals and standardized

[44]

INTRODUCTION

mediocracy, the masses in Europe fall ready vic-
tinas to the lures of American life. This life,
lifted from its social setting in the United States,
is often grotesque. But its material benefits
loom so luscious that it would take more abnega-
tion than impoverished Europe possesses to refuse
them.

Moreover, European society displays a ten-
dency that is almost a determination to remodel
itself along American lines. The older values
are falling into desuetude. The newer leaders,
industrialists, financiers, politicians, recruited as
often as not from the European periphery, possess
no more cultural tradition or cultural interest
than their American prototypes. Democratic
ideology, machine technique, humanitarian mater-
ialism, were all products of the European mind,
and standardization follows naturally in their
train. With the instincts of Polynesian cannibals
these latest children of old Europe have devoured
the parental culture that engendered them. Un-
less it can surprise the world by some brilliant
revival, Europe’s older organic society is moribund.
Its dying would leave the same problems earlier
posed in the United States.

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THIS AMERICAN WORLD

Thanks to the historical accidents of isolation, *
frontier society and natural riches, the Euro-
American people in the United States became more
adequately equipped for the new type of life
than those who remained in the Old Country.
Immersed in the new continent, these ancient
stocks developed that powerful puerility, clever
mastery of machinery, gregarious adoration of
numbers and standardization, mass anonymity,
which make for almost violent efficiency in this
disillusioned yet marvellously organized modern
world.

The last requisite of acknowledged dominion,
prestige, was poured over the United States by
the same war that in pulling down the older social
structure in Europe, created the need for the new.
This prestige, however meretriciously gained, is
threatened only by the revolutionary magnetism
of Soviet Russia. But with Russia excluded by
its own cultural character from Euro-American
civilization, leadership within that civilization may
well accrue to the American people.

Unhampered by much cultural tradition or by •
the finer scruples, mighty in the increment of a
continent tamed by a science he understands

[46]

INTRODUCTION

supremely to exploit, fresh with the faith of
unbroken successes, directed by mass motives
inherited from pioneer fellowship in a primeval
waste, sole beneficiary of the most destructive of
all wars, drawn by spiritual vacuum and capital
scarcity elsewhere, our citizen goes forth blithely
to reap the profits (and incidentally, spread the
benefits) he has learned most to cherish. Mental
democracy and machine organization triumph,
and in the process Babbitt buys the world.

[47]

I

SYSTOLE, DIASTOLE
1

I T was the frontier that made the United States
unique. Pioneer experience drew the dis-
tance separating us from the mother countries.
Less than three hundred years comparative isola-
tion on a rich and all but empty continent trans-
formed traditional European stocks, though
steadily recruited, into a people new in spirit and
surprisingly homogeneous, with habits, emotions,
thoughts, capacities, organization and even a
physique of their own.

Europe at a certain moment was too small and
too poor and too intolerant for the boldest and
most fanatical of her inhabitants, who left the
“ old country ” for the “ new country ” — expres- «
sions I learned first from the foreign-born occu-
pants of our household kitchen. Of all these

[48]

SYSTOLE, DIASTOLE

early emigrants from Europe the finest chose the
temperate region of middle North America, and
became our ancestors. The adventurous char-
acter they brought became steeled in the piety
and hardship of frontier life. Starting at the
Atlantic coast, they gradually drove westward to
the other ocean : not an inch of our soil but has
at one time or another been frontier. Where
the first settlers passed, they quickened the land
in their going. Where they lived and struggled
against recalcitrant nature and more recalcitrant
natives, future generations were born with altered
mind and feeling. The result was the American
spirit.

It is a gay story and a great one. Strange to
say, unlike most that is taught to us in childhood,
it is, sobered of its hyperbole, substantially true.

2

As a student in Paris, I first realized what
“ old country ” meant. I had read much of
Europe and Europe’s history, but I shall not
forget that first winter afternoon when, in the
sinking twilight, I walked along the Seine from
Passy and happened into the Place de la Concorde.

[49] »

THIS AMERICAN WORLD

For that was civilization — ^the first I had ever
seen.

Perhaps my emotion ought to have revealed
to me the suppressed wish of my generation. As
a matter of fact, the revelation came only years
later when I visited the Washington Homestead
in Mount Vernon.

For deep in our racial souls, and again by
most of our formal education, we Americans are
a prolongation of Europe. The early colonists
brought civilization with them. Their bodies
laboured to subdue the wild lands they had
settled, but their minds were continually playing
back and forth across the Atlantic.

The dominant tradition in early America was
English. The English gave us most of our early
population and our language. Through them we
inherited Puritanism, with its curiously practical
combination of moral zeal and moral compromise.
From England we took over our first culture.

English culture was, however, essentially aristo-
cratic. The leading spirits of Colonial days were
utterly unlike our contemporary leaders. In
breadth of vision these men were not inferior to
their European contemporaries. With few excep-

[50]

SYSTOLE, DIASTOLE

* lions, they were familiar with the best thought
of their time in England and in France, and
sympathetic to it. Under their guidance the new
country was almost immediately internationally
efficient, something it is slowly re-learning, under
pressure of events.

All this was more or less apparent in the Mount
Vernon Homestead. The house and grounds,
with their appropriate furniture, all of a piece,
at once simple and prosperous, represented some-
thing that the United States have never since been
able to produce. Mount Vernon was Europe
transplanted to America, as Syracuse remained
Grecian, though in Italy. Mount Vernon was
itself civilization, proving thereby that the early
settlers had been civilized Europeans.

The winning of the West transformed the type
of governing class . The primitive struggle focused
the attention narrowly on our own country, put a
premium on new virtues and developed a new
outlook. In the raw frontier society Puritanism
was useful and survived, while culture was super-
•fluous and perished. The new life gave money
and power to the boldest pioneers and children
of pioneers. Not mature thought, but youthful

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THIS AMERICAN WORLD

strength, courage, physical vitality, optimism, *
with a dash of unscrupulousness, led to success.
When, after the Civil War, the South ceased to
count in an3rthing but statistics and elections,
the aristocratic tradition of culture was dead.

So long as the colonists remained on the Atlantic
seaboard and kept their vivid spiritual ties with
the old country, they were part of Europe. When
they pushed into the interior they severed their
connexion, more particularly after the political
ties were cut by the successful Revolution. The
coastal zone, continually supported by fresh
immigrants, did manage to preserve something
of its European character until it was submerged
in the undertow of the great pioneering wave that
swept westward. When the physical frontier
finally ceased to be, it was found that its spirit,
the state of mind induced by its characteristic
form of living, had moulded a people. Our life
is defined at its basis by pioneer traditions. This
is as true of cosmopolitan New York and fashion-
able Palm Beach as of Peoria or Gary. The
spirit of the frontier is the spirit of modem
America.

Yet the longing for something symbolized by
[ 52 ]

SYSTOLE, DIASTOLE

• Europe never quite abated, perhaps because man
is a civilizing being, and we hankered subcon-
sciously for the only civilization our race had
known and on whose crumbs we were continually
though sparingly nourished. When this longing
became conscious, it showed that the pioneer
wave that started from Europe four centuries ago
had turned, and that the great ebb had begun.

3

Which can be explained autobiographically.
I am of typically American descent and family.
That is to say, my ancestors were of English,
Scotch, Irish, German and Dutch origin. Like
most Americans, I have never had a home. At
the age of six I was moved from the Central
Illinois corn belt to Chicago, growing up on the
half suburban South Side. I tore my stockings
on the sand burs in acres of vacant lots, swam in
Lake Michigan from the old wooden breakwater,
played golf in Jackson Park, familiarized myself
with miles of territory. Yet I never became

• permanently attached to Chicago. I could not.
We never stayed long enough in any one place.
In eleven years we lived in five buildings in as

[53]

THIS AMERICAN WORLD

many parts of the town. I attended six different
schools.

And then, the town itself moved as rapidly
as we. Not only centrifugally. Inwardly. It
changed its appearance from year to year. By
the time familiarity had made me love some
street or district, people came along and changed
it all, tearing down and rebuilding. The neigh-
bourhood had “ changed character ”, my mother
said. Therefore we had to move. I wanted to
stay. Or rather, I should have wanted to stay
if only the old red brick flat buildings with the
dark stairv'ays had been preserved from the vandal
improvers ; if only the vacant lots had not been
filled up and the wooden sidewalks which floated
about so amusingly on the spring floods had been
respected. My mother accused me of misoneism.
She believed in change and progress : I was
“ old-fashioned ”. Really it was the other way
about. I craved a new stability : she was at home
as part of the movement westward.

4

And what a movement it had been ! Four
centuries ago the heart of Europe overflowed,

r<?^i

SYSTOLE, DIASTOLE

and the excess blood was, in a great contraction,
driven to the ends of the earth. South, east,
southwest and west it went, but mostly west
— ^following the sun. What did the first rovers
want ? Almost as many things as they were
individuals. We speak of the new interest in
the physical earth, of humanism, the release from
doctrinal fetters, greed, love of adventure, revival
of learning, economic distress. All true ; but
insufficient. These things do not tell why the
priests and soldiers and adventurers and mer-
chants went forth just then, nor why the many
followed them. What men they were, these
first ! Something in them dignified their very
brutality and greed, and made them not
so much pirates as condottieri of the sea and
wilderness.

De Soto, Cortez, Pizarro, Coronado ; Cham-
plain, Joliet, Magellan and Da Gama ; Drake
and Hawkins — how they came and with what
vitality ! What a pity their chronicles are so
meagre and so rare. An ambitious fabulist like
Ossendowsky strings legend and hearsay and
personal adventure together — and the world de-
vours his works. But if he had done half again

[55]

THIS AMERICAN WORLD

as much as he wrote, what would his achievement •
have been beside the adventures of Cortez ?
Gold-seekers and scoundrels, half helpless in a
world that to them knew neither consistency nor
law and was peopled by phantom as much as by
real perils, they possessed a kind of unequalled
insolence — “ ready to fetch you a tooth-picker
from the furthest inch of Asia ; bring you the
length of Prester John’s foot ; fetch you a hair
off the Great Cham’s beard ; do you any embassy
to the Pygmies

Then followed the settlers, the Pilgrims,
Captain John Smith, Lord Delaware, Roger
Williams and William Penn. After a conquering
struggle they halted for nearly two centuries
on the Atlantic seaboard ; they built Mount
Vernon, that “ Siste Viator ” to the westward
wanderers.

America was too wild and formless for the
transplanted Europeans to accept nature. When
the cultured Thoreau proclaimed the beauties of
natural barbarism, when Whitman sang of the
only true democracy, both were ignored, derided
or condemned. The American people wanted
shelter against nature . The American poets wrote

[56]

SYSTOLE, DIASTOLE

• pretty sonnets by sheer reaction against the ugly
formlessness of pioneer settlements. Whitman
had first to find understanding among over-
civilized Europeans. There had been, to be
sure, an apparent opportunity for the creation of
a pioneer democracy. In the dominant North,
inequality of wealth had not broken down social
friendliness. For the most part, the men of the
time were close to the soil, slightly uncouth,
their philosophy a mixture of mysticism and
materialism, hugely generous and generously
understanding. Had this mysticism been oriented
toward the kind of theistic Pantheism that seemed
native to the new Continent, had its devotees
operated that synthesis between the somewhat
orgiastic Paganism and the natural piety char-
acteristic of our people in its American home,
the American people might have striven con-
sciously toward the establishment of a spiritual
social democracy, wherein the natural inequality
of human beings for all practical and intellec-
tual purposes would have been humanized by a

* lyric feeling for the profound equality of human
souls. Unfortunately, Paganism and piety were
kept rigidly apart, and religious aspiration was

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THIS AMERICAN WORLD

directed exclusively toward the worship of the
Jewish tribal god and the sternly judicial Pauline
Christus.

5

Small wonder that the individual drops which
rose, moved forward and fell again on such a wave
were unirked by lack of permanence. My father
and mother did not themselves emigrate, they
urbanized, and thereby helped to create the
American city, the characteristic social form of
the century. But behind them were generations
of emigrants.

Sometime in the eighteenth century my mother’s
people moved to western New York State. Fifty
years later it was time to move on again.

Grandfather Abram and his wife came into
Illinois in the early forties, looked at the dreary
village near old Fort Dearborn, and deciding that
nothing much would ever come of it, went south
from the sand dunes in search of good black dirt.
The lands they settled are still as fertile, I am told,
as when my pious ancestor began building shelter
for men’s bodies on week days and verbal shelter
for their souls (if only they would repent) on

[58]

SYSTOLE, DIASTOLE

• Sundays. He brought to his task zeal and a
pair of hands that could bend a good-sized nail ;
acquired, during an unusually long life, a remark-
able familiarity with the text of the Bible ; and
died, the oldest inhabitant, as rich as when he
came.

Central Illinois was far enough for Grandfather,
but his wife’s brother, Jake, after an interesting
time passed in digging gold and playing poker in
the Black Hills, was buried in Fargo.

The next generation completed the work.
When I am “ at home ” on Christmas day, I eat
oranges and walnuts grown on my uncle’s Cali-
fornia ranch, within sound of the Pacific surf.

Father’s people gave up before they crossed
the continent, but while they were at it, they
pioneered with a will. Arriving with Lord
Delaware, they later, according to most sacred
family tradition, owned the land where the
University of Virginia now stands. Then cross-
ing the Alleghenies, they founded and gave
their name to a village in southern Ohio.

• Great-great-aunt Esther, a vivid if somewhat
legendary person, moved farther west, missing
no proper and traditional experience of an Ameri-

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THIS AMERICAN WORLD

can pioneer. She ran away from home to marry '
the husband of her choice at fourteen ; later,
her judgment having proved faulty, repeatedly
shipped him over the Ohio River to escape the
sheriff and, while he was absent, supported her
small children with the spoils of her rifle ; eventu-
ally buried the rogue, and, undaunted, espoused
successively and survived several other men.

Great-grandfather is perhaps the most American
of all. The death of his wife Hannah upset his
none too even temper. Aged sixty-two he went
hunting one day (it was late in the thirties)
and failed to kill. Returning home in a rage, he
allowed that when a man with an eye could not
even sight a deer on his own birthday the country
was getting too civilized — and disappeared into
the West.

Some twenty years later, he reappeared.
Gaunt, tall, with his notched rifle for baggage,
he announced he had come back to “ clear the
weeds off Hannah’s grave ”. All day he worked
with the hoe, refusing to say more than that he
had been “ out West fighting Indians ”. When «
his small grandson asked the meaning of the
notches in his gun stock, he refused to say. That

[6o]

SYSTOLE, DIASTOLE

• night, for no apparent reason, he died. But the
family knew why he had come back and worked
so hard.

Not to have the frontier in one’s blood makes
emotional understanding of the United States
impossible. On this account Americans divide
into two groups, the older stocks and the new-
comers. The latter are strong in the cities.
They almost monopolize certain branches of our
life, they dress, conduct themselves, talk and think
like the descendants of old settlers — but they do
not feel as they. That is why so much that is
admirable in American arts and letters, the work
of the later arrivals, does not touch the older
stocks, why to the “ sixth generation American ”
New York often seems as alien as Vienna or
Amsterdam. The talents of the newcomers are
often superior, but they have missed the frontier
experience and the older inhabitants are impatient
of them and their views and their insistent claims
to represent America. Indeed, for a generation
or two, the American people, having achieved

* material stability, wrestled with the un-American
spirit of the later immigrants. But the struggle
was not nearly so severe as many foreign observers

[6i]

THIS AMERICAN WORLD

supposed. It is not over, but it has been won.
It was decided that the older and not the newer
spirit would be that of the country and shape its
future.

6

None the less, the value of the later foreigners
was inestimable. During all the formative years,
the dim intellectual and cultural life of the United
States would have ceased altogether had it not
been for the stream of more gaily souled new-
comers, who bought their way into the new society
by contributing whatever seemed most desired ;
at first, courage and strong arms, then technical
knowledge, and last, the art and colour which
we seemed incapable of producing for ourselves
and had not yet learned to take from the Negroes.

But the late arrivals were almost all of humble
origin. Proximity to them did not encourage
Young America to self-examination and criticism.
Twenty years ago nationalism was less vociferous
than to-day, but just as deeply rooted. Our
environment required us to think of the United
States as something un-European and sublime
and of Europeans as laggards who had failed to

162 1

SYSTOLE, DIASTOLE

* develop the opportunities latent in the species.
All Europeans.

The English were historically the closest to us,
having “ practically ” discovered America. (As
a boy I knew that Columbus was a Genoese who
sailed for Spain, but never identified his name
with that of “ Sam ” Colombo, the Dago who
sold cabbages and “ Brussels sproutsels ” at the
back door ; and only as a man I chanced on the
Venetian home of John and Sebastian Cabot ; I
had thought them English.) It was natural and
right that what one might call the pre-natal part
of our historical ontogeny be laid in England.
Most of us had a good deal of English blood in
our veins ; except the immigrants, we all spoke
English. It was proper that the English nation
should, except when fighting against us, always
have beaten the French, an effeminate people
who attached absurd importance to art and
manners and women. In Chicago we saw no
Frenchmen.

Not but what the English were effeminate as
•well. They gave their sons such affected names
as Percival and Archibald. They had little sense
of democracy and during the Civil War were

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THIS AMERICAN WORLD

said to have sympathized with the slave-owning '
South. They had stiff manners and spoke the
language in a curious irrational way. On one
occasion they had even managed, unfairly, of
course, to be successful in war against us and had
burned our national capitol ; later, they robbed
us of British Columbia. But on the whole, from
the days of John Paul Jones and Andrew Jack-
son we had always beaten them and always would.

The numerous Germans were looked upon with
critical approval and considered stupid but honest.
The Irish were Micks, but smart and good fighters.
Jews were of two kinds : “ dirty ” and otherwise.
Against the latter we had no feeling. The other
foreigners were hardly to be considered at all.

We city-dwelling American children were in
fact strangely incurious about the little Micks
and Dagoes and Bohunks and “ Swedes ” (a
word which included all Scandinavians and very
blond Germans) who wandered in and out of
our world. The population in our eyes was
composed of Americans and foreigners who
aspired to become Americans and whose children ♦
might possibly achieve the honour. For the
present they were inferiors. I was willing to

[64]

SYSTOLE, DIASTOLE

help them outgrow their inferiority and in social
intercourse often favoured them — ^to my mother’s
annoyance ; never, except when I intended
offence, alluding to the unfortunate accident of
their birth. These foreigners were scattered
everywhere, but tended to collect into districts,
through which, though cautioned by our parents,
we liked to wander in the mixed expectancy and
dread of a clash with their sons of about our
age, who were “tough”. That the sons felt us
as strangers was proved by the fact that contact
sometimes led to blows in which native America
was not always victorious.

This was in daily life. In reading and studies
it was different. Most of the books we preferred
had been written by Englishmen. No denying
that. Even better ones had been written by
Frenchmen named Dumas and Hugo. While
really good fairy tales were almost invariably
found “translated from the original German”.
Geometry, a study which fascinated me, appeared
to have been invented by a single Greek (the
Greeks I knew were chiefly interested in fruit
and ice cream). As for music, aside from a few
patriotic hymns and “Negro melodies”, nearly

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all the tunes, when not the words, had been
composed by foreigners.

It was a puzzle of which I was for a long time
unaware. But I remember the day, when, pos-
sibly under the influence of Euclid, I stumbled
on the following syllogism :

Since (i) education is a fine thing and (2) most
of it has been produced by foreigners, then (3) these
foreigners cannot be inferior to us who have no
education of our own.

Which was plainly absurd. But my ensuing
uncertainty about this matter was that of most of
my countrymen.

7

For approximately fifty years after the gold
rush to the Pacific Coast, or, roughly, during the
second half of the nineteenth century, the
United States were so absorbed by internal affairs
that they had no time to muse, remember or
anticipate. There was the constitutional crisis
of the Civil War, the winning of the Far West,
the broader process of wholesale industrialization
and the allied task of building up that entirely
unrivalled prosperity which is the aim and arbiter

[ 66 ]

SYSTOLE, DIASTOLE

of our lives. Of the success, let the statisticians
tell. This was approximately the era of my
parents, and, true to the instinct that has made
us barometers of national development, they
turned their attention to making a better living
for themselves and preparing a less primitive
environment for their children.

Those were the days of complete self-satis-
faction, when the average American, secure in
his country’s isolation, knew little and cared
less for the affairs of the world. So far as he
was concerned, mankind had begun with the
birth of George Washington, and might profitably
fade away with the fading of the United States.

But the average American reckoned without
the prosperity he strove so pluckily to attain.
First of all, because prosperity meant accumulated
capital, which tended to flow into those parts,
even barbarian foreign parts, where it found
fullest retribution. Even before the Spanish-
American War, our investments in Latin America
were considerable. Even without the World
* War, the Americans were on the way to become a
nation of foreign investors. And where our
money goes, we follow.

[67]

THIS AMERICAN WORLD

More important, prosperity created leisure,
which, like a hollow tooth, must be filled or it
aches. Leisure brought realization : we had
conquered and occupied and industrialized the
land between the two oceans — but we were not
happy. We told ourselves we had nothing to
wish for — and knew our words a lie.

Little by little it became perceptible that the
centre of our so busy lives was an empty waste
similar to that continental wilderness we had so
buoyantly colonized. Of a real inner life, despite
the often perfervid heat of our religious and
sociological enthusiasm, we possessed only a
copy, presented ready-made. Most of our philo-
sophy, science, art, colour and sophisticated amuse-
ment came straight from Europe. Our own
writers were either assimilative or unfruitful. Of
the good ones, all but Whitman showed, in the
nineteenth century, the sallow complexion of
indigestion. The pioneer blizzards from Medi-
cine Hat had withered the New England “ Indian
summer of the mind ” and left nothing in its
place. A few individualists had always hankered
for something America did not offer. Many
drooped in silence. The best, Henry James and

[ 68 ]

SYSTOLE, DIASTOLE

Mark Twain, went abroad to die of severed roots,
or remained to suffer and blaspheme. The
mass were mightily American — ^and lonesome.
Better a new continent to conquer than an empty
mind to fill !

There was no denying the fact : for every-
one except engineers and captains of industry
and social reformers, life in these prosperous
States was a bore.

An outworn religion administered by hard-
headed ministers ready to pact with the rich, a
number of plutocratic leaders interested in main-
taining the masses just as they are, a self-assured,
attractive yet intellectually timid people, easily
cowed by eschatological threats and fear of
appearing different from their fellows — these pre-
clude any short cut to culture by borrowing from
Europe or by honest native efforts. America
had to follow the longer process and, within the
frame of circumstances, become educated by slow
degrees. The plutocrats were in possession of
as much leisure as they desired to take. At first
*mere wealth satisfied them. The esteem and
envy of their less successful fellows nourished
their inner hunger. When the figure on the

[69]

THIS AMERICAN WORLD

cheque stubs no longer brought a thrill, they '
started to refine their material surroundings.
They began to build and furnish sumptuous
houses under the direction of a class of “ royal ”
architects, sculptors and painters, who were doing
all they could to keep art expensive. They
began to employ experts to bring together rare
antiques and strange collections. They entered
the market against European connoisseurs and
sometimes brought home the prizes.

As the years went by, some of them even
began to relish ideas. Many of the newer leaders
had passed through one of those American univer-
sities in which a man of will is not altogether
precluded from getting an education.

Across the ocean, back in the “old country”,
was a disintegrating but still delightful culture.
Some American millionaires took to spending
considerable time there. Many went in for the
cheaper social and sporting honours. A few
refused to waste any more time in the pursuit of
either riches or self-advertisement. One could
occasionally find them knocking about in odd’
corners of the world, reading good books, study-
ing problems of world politics, philosophy, reli-

[70]

SYSTOLE, DIASTOLE

• gion. Their gratitude for a little disinterested
companionship of an intellectual type was
touching.

The mass of educated Americans resented the
fuller European life. America would work out
its own salvation, they said. Unconsciously they,
too, had begun to feel the pull of the ebbing
tide.

8

It was, I believe, in the nineties that the first
group of conscious American rebels against a
standardized vacuum began to appear. In liter-
ature they made a fairly small figure ; in life they
were larger. By the end of the next decade the
movement was swelling, and had begun to be
noticed by the community. As students in a
dull mid-western university, savagely resisting
local pressure for practical education and good
citizenship (I remember electing a course in
Russian as protest against the first, and another
in Neo-Platonism to show my contempt of the
• latter) we embraced the cause of these American
radicals. Mencken, the eternally juvenile, Robert
Herrick and even Dreiser lacked the colour and

[71]

THIS AMERICAN WORLD

yardage of banners, but such as they were we
waved them. Against the heroes of a spiritless
factual scholarship compounded of positivism
and the “historical method”, we discovered and
publicly preferred Yeats, Aubrey Beardsley, Rim-
baud, Nietzsche and Wedekind. I fail to see
to-day any unifying principle in our choice ; but
at least Celtic symbolism and German sensualism
and American revolt offered an excuse for oppos-
ing the dull world into which the educational
authorities stood ready to usher us.

The presence in the university of various
evangelical auxiliaries to education ever ready
to “ interfere ” and “influence”, sent me to seek
release in the Hebrew Bible and Brahminism.
Self-satisfied sociology drove me to Max Stirner
and the lectures of Emma Goldman. Not aca-
demic courses but an interest in socialism awakened
by reaction to the general pressure to get on and
become rich, brought me to the economics of
John Stuart Mill and Charles Gide, in an effort
to weigh the “ plus value ” theory.

When the war finally came, it found America
a field already tilled. It was during this period
that America definitely became self-conscious.

[72]

SYSTOLE, DIASTOLE

9

It was not the prolonged struggle that exhausted
Europe’s spiritual vitality. That great river was
already running thin. By the end of the century
the European unity of style had split into virtual
anarchy. Fin-de-siicle neurosis was everywhere.
It was no mere coincidence that cubism and
atonal music and psychoanalysis preceded the
armed conflict. Whatever their intrinsic value,
they represented in their own spheres the same
forces that were so soon to emerge in the night-
mare of 1914.

Therefore the decade 1910-1920 may some
day receive historical consideration less for the
catastrophe it contained than for the fact that
approximately then the great heart which for
centuries had nourished the five continents sud-
denly ceased to suffice for home consumption.
Europe no longer possessed the nerve force for
new spiritual creation.

• 10

Suddenly, during the war, the great umbilical
artery connecting us to Europe ran dry. And

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THIS AMERICAN WORLD

like a newborn baby, we gasped and discovered*
we had a hitherto hardly noticed driving centre
of our own. In trade and industry, in finance,
finally even in the realm of intellect, we were
forced back on our own resources. The result
astonished the world — and us as part of it. When,
during the long deadlock of warring peoples,
Europe’s mind went blank and failed to produce a
peace formula, the United States supplied the
ideal force that really brought the conflict to an
end, the since derided democratic slogan which
really expressed something that flourishes in our
country — and perhaps there alone.

Ours were the notions, though not the spirit,
that shaped the war settlement : ours are the
golden chains that have for the time being roped
the centrifugally minded fragments of Europe
together.

But besides the expansive pressure of our own
abundance, and the call of the empty heart,
there was another circumstance that prepared the
way for our growing interest in Europe. The
American Expedition was hardly fortuitous in its'
origin, since Europe had begun to show a spiritual
deficit that \vorked like a vacuum. It was any-

[74]

SYSTOLE, DIASTOLE

• thing but fortuitous in its consequences. During
the war, nearly three million young Americans
had personal contact with a full-blown civilization.
As individuals, most of the soldiers felt themselves
alien. Puritanism and frontier provincialism pre-
vented full understanding and approval, but they
tasted a subtle drug ; looked in the window at a
life that is not all work and sports and uplift ;
heard melodies more exciting than the American
C-major hymn to progress. When they re-
turned home, something of it all remained.

And not all the soldiers returned. Over the
globe, especially in Europe, there is a sprinkling
of war veterans who, when discharged from the
army, refused to go home. They are not merely
city youths intoxicated with the free life of
Paris, Berlin, Copenhagen. They come from
Davenport and Oklahoma City and prefer an
adult’s world to a beautifully kept nursery.

In nearly every developed American who does
not go in for drink or advertising or reform, there
is some slight wish to create civilization — a more
•complex aesthetic and intellectual life in vital
forms America does not as yet provide It is a
desire for leisure bravely filled, for internal as well

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THIS AMERICAN WORLD

as external adventure, for what can only be called *
culture.

II

Hence the new American attitude to Europe
and the increasing number of visitors. I do not
refer to those who come seeking a field of oper-
ations for their own activities, those financial and
mechanical and commercial schemes in which
Americans are proving so efficient. They are
comparatively few. It is not only fashionable
curiosity or a desire to see the places they have
read about that draws the others — not even,
generally speaking, a desire to study new art
movements or innovations in traffic control.
Contemporary Europe has little to teach and,
except fine personalities inaccessible to the casual
tourist, little to offer. What draws the American
is the thing fossilized in Mount Vernon, some-
thing whose last bloom can still be seen in Sussex
and Touraine — a civilized and organic society.
He is the pioneer runaway returning to his own
youth, to his aged and genteel parents. He*
finds them quaint ; they seem less vital than
contemporary Americans. But their refined old

[76]

SYSTOLE, DIASTOLE

•features, with the hint of subtle joys and under-
standings he renounced for more vivid experi-
ences, stir him more than he will admit. He
smiles at their old-fashioned ways, he wonders
at their conservatism ; eagerly he exhibits the
fruits of his wanderings and offers assistance from
his well-filled pockets. Half he envies them the
settled and refined old homestead they have
begxm a little to neglect. But as for living with

them Two generations always find it hard

to live together, and between the new country
and the old lie, not generations, but centuries of
absence. The American must go back to the
country he has made, a little more conscious of its
shortcomings and of the fact that individual
prosperity does not necessarily make for civilized
living. He may even, if he be unusually impres-
sionable, wonder wistfully whether true civiliza-
tion can ever bloom in a homeless land. . . .

Meanwhile the tide runs eastward across the
Atlantic and the prodigal returns, not to repent
but to dream and demonstrate and sell. Europe
^s becoming Americanized.

Systole, diastole.

[77]

II

THE

ESSENCE OF AMERICANISM

I

T he handiworks of nature reveal so much in-
dividuality that a variation from continent to
continent, even in such partly self-determining
creatures as human beings, ought to be expected.
Yet, given the slowness of nature’s methods, it
is remarkable that we Americans, a people Euro-
pean in origin and of mixed stock, have in so
short a time acquired something which differen-
tiates us sharply from each and all the peoples
of the Mother Continent. The “ typically Ameri-
can ” is almost as distinguishable anywhere as the
“ typically African ”. A European landing in the
United States realizes at once that he is outside*
his family circle. An American returning after
years of absence is equally aware of the change.

[78]

THE ESSENCE OF AMERICANISM

•It is not essentially a matter of different exter-
nals or even physique. The fact is that there
is something in the national personality which
differentiates us from the rest of the world.

We feel this something, this Americanism — our
army in France suffered acutely from spiritual
maladjustment — and are glad of it, proud of it.
Europeans are equally conscious of it, equally
self-satisfied, and on the basis of it maintain a
somewhat patronizing air which not even their
post-war dependence upon us has obliterated.

2

Yet Americanism is like being or free vdll or
motion. So long as we avoid definition we know
all that is necessary about it. When we start to
be precise we are no longer very sure. As an
abstract something, a quintessence of analysis
and experience, it annoys our American minds
by escaping mathematical calculation or reduc-
tion to a quantitative standard. At most we can
only describe our view of it; negatively by afiirm-
iftg what it is not, or positively by aggregation of
admitted features. While throughout the world
Americanism is to-day a common expression

[79]

THIS AMERICAN WORLD

standing for anything from gum chewing to Be-
haviourism, any attempt to fix its meaning funda-
mentally or exhaustively usually ends in a serious
and thoroughly unscientific controversy.

Even at home we are hazy about what we
mean. The Americanism of the Legion and the
Ku Klux is only distantly related to that of the
Rotary Clubs and Kiwanis. There is a chasm
between the serene appreciation of present America
by Santayana and Waldo Frank’s lyric dream of a
true civilization, though to me both are admirable.

If we go abroad the disagreement is worse.
Even so jovial a soul as Gilbert K. Chesterton
finds Americanism an appalling danger to con-
temporary Europe. An acute German, Theodor
Liiddecke, sees similar peril in the “ rhythm of
American economic life”. And most extreme is
W. T. Colyer, an English communist, who defines
Americanism as a “ world menace ” and decrees
to the Americans who are fighting it the same
universal admiration by enlightened men that
he bestows on the pioneer revolutionaries of
Russia under tsardom. On the other side, v
gifted young French writer, Jean Georges Auriol,
believes “ American brutality ” to be the much

[8o]

THE ESSENCE OP AMERICANISM

deeded antidote for Europe’s “ excessively cere-
bral sensibility”, meaning, doubtless, Europe’s
intellectual aloofness from fundamentals.

It is a little confusing. How can we know
ourselves when some find the essence of our
civilization to be supercapitalism ; some, absolute
industrialism ; others collectivism crushing to
personality ; and still others, “ Anglo-Saxon
individualism ” ? To us, generally, Americanism
is identified with political freedom : to Central
and South America, as well as to our own Negroes,
we spell arrogance and oppression.

Now of course Americanism must in some
sense signify everything particular that we are
or think or do. But this is not enough. Intel-
ligibility requires some identity of concept and
vocabulary between speaker and listener.

3

Our national personality is growing and har-
dening. There is an American view of life, an
American type of conduct, an American dress
a'hd carriage, American manners, American busi-
ness methods, American social customs and
beliefs, American architecture. American money,

[8i]

THIS AMERICAN WORLD

prestige, travellers, films and printed books and
periodicals are taking American life everywhere,
with obvious results. Go where you will, you find
increasing signs of American influence. But
it is far from easy to state just what this influence
consists in. What is it that has made us different
from our own blood ancestors and cousins in
Europe ; what distinguishes us from the Sibe-
rians, a people whose climate, type of life,
available territory and opportunities are at least
comparable to ours ? Is Americanism some-
thing new and original ? Professor Wilhelm
Worringcr, a brilliant historian, believes that the
old Egyptians were, to all intents and purposes,
the Americans of their day, an artificial people,
without true inwardness or creative power, but
great in material achievement and sense of
expediency. Are the United States an inspiration
or an episode ? Are we a beginning or an end of
something ? Or is North America merely the
appropriate setting for one more scene in the
long human adventure that began with the first
stir of life on this planet ?

Is Americanism a levelling down and a medio-
cracy or are our leaders, at least in finance and

[82]

THE ESSENCE OF AMERICANISM

Industry, as toweringly great as they themselves
and the success magazines believe them to be ?

Clearly, not all the elements huddled under
the elastic term “ Americanism ” are of equal
essence. Some are accidental or peripheral or
derived, while others possess at least historical
and spiritual primacy and seem more central to
our national being. But no question of the value,
importance, depth, extent and prospects of Ameri-
canism can rise until the more important of these
elements be selected from the aggregate. Such a
selection, being personal and without rigid scienti-
fic criterion, will be approved or rejected on much
the same general grounds upon which men select
their philosophy, namely, on its power of inner
conviction, its applicability, its degree of har-
mony to the demands of the mind and the imagin-
ation. At the same time no one would take the
trouble to make, still less to publish, such a
selection without the conviction that it comes close
to the “ essential truth”.

4

English Liberty is defined by its apologist,
George Santayana, as “ the slow co-operation of

[83]

THIS AMERICAN WORLD

free men It is our direct heritage from Greal
Britain, was brought by the first settlers and
cannot be overestimated as a force in shaping
our characters. It implies that, in last analysis,
there arc no conflicting interests within a single
people so important that for any of them the
existence of the whole should be jeopardized.
Its importance in our national history is funda-
mental. Under English Liberty the American
people, so originally heterogeneous, have only
once pushed domestic dispute to its bitter bloody
end. English Liberty is the foe of all fanaticism
and of every absolute truth, the friend of compro-
mise, political expediency and statesmanship.
'Ehcrefore it resists social pressure from both
sides and produces an atmosphere favourable to
moderate individualism.

It has preserved our confidence in some per-
sonal freedom even under majority constraint.
It has made us resolute opponents of any obliga-
tory co-operation such as Marxism, has held off
factional domination and formed us pliant to the
social whole.

It has done more : it has greatly modified
natural envy. Even Puritan fanatics were led

[84]

THE ESSENCE OF AMERICANISM

fo a view of life as a game played among friends
according to certain rules. Thanks to this, we
have conquered our continent and enriched our-
selves beyond all previous example without much
quarrelling. The American attitude toward the
millionaire is not hostile or envious : it is rather
that of the high-school athlete toward an Olympic
champion — admiration of achievement in the
field where all are striving. Our political life
lacks (on the whole) the sharp hostilities and
cruel partisanship of continental Europe precisely
because of the ancient English belief that all
social existence is at best a compromise.

But while in England special classes and tradi-
tions and privileges checked the full development
of this social and ethical convention, in the
United States frontier life made “ the slow co-
operation of free men ” into a universal (and
intangible) dogma, invaluable in the subjugation
of the wilderness. Frontier life forced us to be
companionable, by driving home the advantages
of sticking together. It made us generous by
instinctive self-interest. In such a milieu the
English tendency toward free co-operation was
turned into a htmdred vital fields. In the words

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THIS AMERICAN WORLD

of Santayana, “ Ever3rwhere co-operation is takerl
for granted, as something no one would be short
sighted enough to refuse. . . . It is of the essence
of Americanism and is accepted as such by all
the polyglot peoples that turn to the new world
with the pathetic but manly purpose of beginning
life on a new principle. . . . The instinct is to
run and help.”

Without English Liberty, developed and per-
fected, modern America could never have come
to be.

.S

Puritanism began in America as the grim fore-
bodings of self-righteous and tyrannous kill-
joys and ended by producing a nation of voci-
ferous optimists. Starting as a terrifying doc-
trine of (Irace whereby some were predestined
to sing and some to simmer for all eternity,
Puritanism in the United States went through
a mo.st curious process of transformation. In
odd corners you can, thanks to a somewhat delib-
erate seclusion, still find it in its original strength,
and in those districts there really remains some-
thing of the thin-lipped Stoicism of the founders.

[ 86 ]

THE ESSENCE OF AMERICANISM

•But on the whole, despite generations of brimstone
divines and loud-mouthed revivalists, the old
Puritan spirit is failing. Its sexual scruples, its
snarl at pleasure and its distrust of intellect have
remained, in so far as they could take cover
under new labels, such as social decency and good
citizenship ; but as Puritan taboos they are dead,
or nearly so.

Yet we are a religious people. Not all of the
early doctrine was discarded. A severely reli-
gious soul under the doctrine of Grace might
take comfort in the thought of its own damnation
if only it could rise to the height of envisaging
the personal catastrophe as a small but essential
detail in a pageant planned from the beginning of
time. As a people we have risen to this moral
conquest.

Yet in Puritanism there was a second element
which was fostered and developed from year to
year and finally came to be the greatest creative
force in the American mind — I mean the belief
in the will.

The primacy of the will over the intellect and
emotions was implicit in nearly all early Pro-
testantism. Luther, Calvin, Cromwell, were

[87]

THIS AMERICAN WORLD

leaders of immense and concentrated will power,*
conscious that however inevitable Divine selection
in heaven, on earth belief in (one’s own) righteous-
ness and destiny could generate all but irresistible
strength . Throughout nearly all Protestant teach-
ing the proclaimed necessity of the submissive
or converted will actually resulted in a concen-
trated sense of purpose. The real religion of
the immense majority of modern Americans
derives directly from the early Puritan preoccu-
pation with “ right willing

Obvious is the genealogy of modern tran-
scendentalism, the yea-saying and autosuggestion
and success cults of Trine and Mulford and
Mary Baker Eddy. The modern American be-
lieves in the power of the will, if properly directed,
to overcome all obstacles. Therefore success is
always possible for those who make the requisite
effort. And so strong is the belief in properly
applied will power that advocates of the more
traditional cults, the Puritan sects and Catholicism
a Vamiricaine, have had to accept the prevailing
dogma concerning the intimate identity of merit
and riches and the automatic relationship of
reward to effort, even where it goes directly

[ 88 ]

THE ESSENCE OF AMERICANISM

• against the established intellectual tenets of their
faith.

Since the will is everything, acceptance and
education and reform are the vital practices. The
will is master of the intellect. Therefore no
reform is too far fetched, no ideal unattainable,
no missionary undertaking without prospect of
success. Our fervour is unlimited because we
think as we believe and do not believe as we
think. Never has been such a passionate pack of
believers. No civilization has produced more
different schools for training the will and influ-
encing the belief, from the commercial sharpers
who promise high incomes, to William James,
who justified the habit of believing what is
pleasant and practical. The myriad ethereal or
materialistic cults and philosophies all preach-
ing the possibility and virtue of success spring
directly from Puritanism’s emphasis on the vol-
untary faculties.

This doctrine, in a society credulous of science,
has engendered the general notion concerning
the almost divine powers of education and the
belief culminating in Behaviourism, that the
individual, being born “ neutral protoplasm ”, can

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THIS AMERICAN WORLD

be deliberately shaped to any form or abilities •
we like if only the education be correct. Which
is optimism in its ultimate form.

Even our common sense rationalism is anti-
intellectual. For it conceives human souls and
processes on the pattern of the machine — itself
a naked embodiment of purpose and will.

Born healthy, with the Puritan impulse to
believe in the ultimate goodness of a cosmos
that produces, even amid so much distress, sun-
sets and Packards and Panama canals, we needed
only to recast passive and individualistic European
religion in terms of universality (the crowd) to
clear the way for unlimited good cheer. Since
steady purpose can accomplish anything, one
need only send the millions to proper schools and
universities to turn out numberless Pasteurs and
Miltons and Edisons. Only belief is hard and
needs to he affirmed and reiterated and suggested
endlessly. The rest will follow in due course.
This is our conviction and it is an apotheosis of
will power.

When later this tendency was found capable*
of being artificially stimulated for practical ends
such as increasing output and forestalling social

[90]

THE ESSENCE OF AMERICANISM

• rebellion, it became an obligatory national dogma
and we a nation of boosters . . . “ almost a
theocracy of efficiency ”, a French sociologist has
called us.

6

Despite the criticism of cynics and social
radicals the United States of America are a
democracy. This means, first of all, that the
majority can and sometimes do obtain their
political will. But this state of things is much
more literally realized in certain other countries
without leading to the development of democracy
like ours. Mere political democracy is not incom-
patible with fairly rigid classes, as in Great
Britain. In France owing to a widely respected
tradition of cultural achievement and to an
unconquerable individualism, political democracy
has allowed numerous “ worlds ” to continue
to exist side by side within the same state.

Not so with the United States. With us the
frontier erased the cultural traditions and melted
the most varied social units into a common metal
to be stamped by our exclusive social experience.

Frontier life made us a homogeneous society

[91]

THIS AMERICAN WORLD

(nobody had anything). On the prairie and in ’
the mining camp, each man was “ just as good ”
as the others, if only because the fundamental
outlook, expectations and aims of all were the
same. Factors of this nature are far more
powerful than any formal organization of state
or society. But the frontier period passed. To
resist the subtle demoralizing tendencies of later
social differentiation a firmer basis was at hand
in the doctrines of John Locke and Sir William
Blackstone, which had stimulated the Declaration
of Independence and became faintly embodied
even in the Federal Constitution. Out of Eigh-
teenth Century philosophy and jurisprudence the
American founders took over and emphatically
expressed the doctrine of the Natural Equality
of all men — a heresy many of the formulators
could hardly have believed — with consequences
to us that cannot be overestimated.

Obviously there are inherent differences be-
tween man and man which no cant about all
being “ born free and equal ” can eliminate.
But it is a fact that the United States produced
a society which honestly seeks to eliminate them
except in so far as they can all be inspired by

[92]

THE ESSENCE OF AMERICANISM

similar wishes and beliefs and directed to the
same ends. We do not demand that our social
units be of precisely the same length and thick-
ness, but most emphatically we require them to
conform their position and aims to the pattern of
the common magnetic field. Frontier experience
shaped the pattern and established the habit of
conformity. The field itself is shaped by certain
values, presumably natural to everyone, and
actually those of the vast majority of our citizens.
In the United States these values are incor-
porated in the conceptions of prosperity, service
and opportunity. Belief in common values and
the participation of all in their pursuit and attain-
ment, is democracy.

All that is compatible with them should and
can be furthered ; whatever endangers them
must be frowned on and where possible eliminated.
Heterodoxy is the chief enemy. Which explains
social paradoxes that baffle foreigners. Economic
inequality is compatible with our sort of demo-
cracy, since vast fortunes are the demonstration
that our aims are possible. Personal liberty
and social tolerance upset the pre-established
harmony except in so far as limited differentiation

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THIS AMERICAN WORLD

be needed for constant rejuvenation. It is not
entirely exact to talk of the “ levelling down ”
process in the United States. Americans wel-
come leadership within the limits and fields set
by the national consciousness. Where novelty
can be shown to increase prosperity or service
it is welcomed. What we oppose is not intelli-
gent leaders but intellectual independence.
Therefore our democracy is equally powerful in
social and intellectual and emotional matters.
Our life has, outside limited fields, been organized
according to the tastes of the masses. In tech-
nical matters, such as business and sport and
practical science, we permit the widest differ-
entiation of quality and method. But in the
choice of ideals themselves we hold that one man’s
opinion is as good as another’s and consider that
important religious and moral problems have
already been settled by popular vote. This does
not preclude change, but it retards it until it has
become commonplace. For the aim of society is
the “ greatest happiness of the greatest number ”,
who, according to Natural Equality, are com-
petent to decide when and how they are happiest.

In a very real sense the American nation fulfils

[94]

THE ESSENCE OF AMERICANISM

the communist wish for a one-class state. So
long as we keep the gates of opportunity ajar
we are all bourgeois, even the poorest. Outside
the Negroes and the latest foreigners who have
not yet adopted our view of life, American society,
within the limits of natural snobbery, is class-
less. New-comers find immediate entrance into
the community as soon as they learn to conform
to majority standards and accept — or pretend to
accept — our national values. To all who will
not or who cannot conform, whether within or
without, we are pitiless.

Prosperity, service and opportunity are no mean
ideals. National Equality implies that if a thing
is good, everybody ought to have it and that
what is not ultimately accessible to the mass
cannot be really valuable. Which has led to
the most profound transformation of economic
life known in history. Prosperity, as an ideal,
distinguishes our economic structure from that
of the industrialized states of Europe. They
work for individual and national wealth ; we
demand that wealth be collective. We desire
individually to become rich, but in a prosperous
community, not in a castle overlooking a valley

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THIS AMERICAN WORLD

of hovels. And we can achieve this because the
standardization of personality has made external
standardization natural and attractive and there-
by prepared the way for the unlimited technical
developments proper to the age. The several
revolutionary inventions in transport and pro-
ductive machinery have been more often of
European origin but their complete application
could find acceptance only in a country that
welcomed every novelty harmonious with its
collective ideal. Outside communist Russia, in
the United States lives the only dense and pro-
gressive population that likes the idea of wearing
the same clothes, living in similar houses and
towns, riding in identical automobiles — and there-
by permits all these things to be multiplied at
ever more reasonable prices with less human
labour.

Having so carefully circumscribed our goal,
we can proceed toward it with ever greater
efficiency.

Service, however, asks that the rewards of
efficiency be adequately distributed and that no
activity be allowed to prosper which does not
benefit the community and help it in the way it

[96]

THE ESSENCE OF AMERICANISM

wants to go. Prosperity is built on commerce ;
selling shoes and advertising tooth paste are
branches of commerce ; therefore selling shoes and
advertising tooth paste are service — z conception
that few but native Americans can understand.

Naturally, therefore, we fall easy prey to the
priests of advertising. Where the acquiring of
things is a religion, the offering of them is sacer-
dotal. There is a theology of advertising. There
is a logic and a catechism. To saddle the public
with useless articles, to create an unnatural demand
for them, to scrap the still sound article and
purchase the ever less durable novelty, to keep
the styles moving — such are the aims pursued
by advertisers with an almost missionary zeal.
And to the exigencies of scientific advertising we
subordinate entirely our fundamental aesthetic
instinct and often our ethical instinct as well.
But this spirit of service, which also dates from
the frontier, makes us, despite the absence of
workmen’s insurance, pensions, etc., kinder to
our poor and disabled than other countries. If
you do not believe it, ask a person of cosmopolitan
experience in which land he would prefer to be
poor and friendless.

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On this account, too, our personally none too
generous industrial and commercial leaders are
furthering the scattering of corporate ownership
throughout the country and increasing profit shar-
ing and bonus schemes on such a scale that an
ever greater proportion of American workers
tend to feel themselves useful in, rather than used
by, the economic process.

It is not better machinery alone that has made
tlic average output of the American workman
in most fields greater than that of his European
brother. It is a different spirit based on the
belief that greater production means a higher
return, that there is a place in the national fabric
for everyone and that those who combine brains
and courage with efficiency and orthodoxy can
obtain unusual rewards. It is the belief in
opportunity. This is a well grounded belief.
Despite the immense complexity of our economic
organization, the way to leadership can and usually
is found by men of fairly humble origin. The
statement that opportunity in America is dimin-
ishing cannot be substantiated from the facts.
If anything, the opposite is true.

Prosperity, service and opportunity, the American

[98]

the essence of AMERICANISM

trinity, make the American society the most
homogeneous and solid in the world. And like
that other trinity, they are but the several mani-
festations of a single ideal. Its name is Natural
Equality.

7

“ Americanism ”, according to Theodor Liid-
decke, is “ the economic instinct raised in all
departments of private and public life to its
highest power.” This is not a bad definition.
But it implies that we are more material and
gain-seeking than other peoples. Neither of
which is exact. The truth is that to the American
people business and economic life are more thril-
ling than they are to Europeans. With us busi-
ness is not primarily a means of making a living,
not even an interesting occupation ; it is our
chosen field of high adventure. As middle class
democrats walled in by majority rule, our only
free field is the economic. We have frankly
faced our appropriative instinct and allowed it full
play, largely for the pleasure it affords us. Inci-
dentally we have practically eliminated poverty ;
incidentally developed mighty industries. The

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THIS AMERICAN WORLD

urge is the buccaneering tradition that has lasted
since the days of Hawkins. We know Hawkins
was a slave dealer ; so are not a few of the modern
industrial captains whom we admire. But it is
not as slave dealers, not even as millionaires, that
we look upon them — it is as successful figures in
the glorious adventure in which most of us, on
different levels, are engaged. In our churches
we are hypocrites or devotees of success, in our
homes we are Babbitts, in our museums and
libraries we are bored : in the office alone we are
creative gods and free to stretch our imagination
and efforts in any direction, limited only by very
elastic laws and the rules of the game. Here in
the field of business and economics we have
established our finest achievements, careless
whether in this one expression of our inner-
most selves we dwarf or stamp out other exis-
tences hopelessly uncongenial to our dreams.

At the same time, because we are a democracy,
the economic buccaneering of the privileged and
more capable few must blossom into general
prosperity or it will not long be tolerated. And
strange to say, in almost every case the effort to
pass as a public benefactor constitutes the final

[ 100 ]

THE ESSENCE OF AMERICANISM

ambition of the successful buccaneer and even
adventure must somehow pay its way as service.

8

English Liberty, Right Will, Natural Equality
are in my opinion the essentials of Americanism
as it germinates in the United States. But thanks
to them and a continent to play on, the spirit of
Economic Adventure which animated the earliest
explorers and colonists has remained undiminished
— to such an extent that this spirit, though clearly
of another order than the essential ideas, is
responsible for much of what Europe takes for
true Americanism.

Economic Adventure is the key to our so-called
materialism. It is true that we seek money
with steadfastness and passion as the reward of
the game and that the only generally accepted
standard of excellence we possess is property.
Tell me what you have and I will tell you what
you are. This love of things is the origin of the
foreign belief that we love money. Most natural
misconception. No people in the world holds
mere wealth so lightly. What we like is the
symbolism of money. Our pioneers naturally
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THIS AMERICAN WORLD

longed for the comfort and luxury they so signally
lacked. When they grew rich, they gratified the
wishes of their early days. This is the origin
of our soft material life. In the trenches in
France none found primitive living quite so
unbearable as the “ grand-children of the pion-
eers Even at our broadest, when we dream of
helping mankind, we naturally think first, not of
beauty or brains or religion, but of better material
living. This we call increasing happiness.

Even our loose social order and our home-
lessness are derived. With our cities so stan-
dardized that to go from one to another is to
suffer no change in focus, with the automobile
at every door, it is natural for us to pick up and
move. So long as we stay within the same
spiritual territory we lose nothing, for all of
value in our past is in us and goes with us.

Because of our optimism and our meagre past
we look to the future. We look to science and are
competent in research.

Of course our personal freedom, in the absolute
sense, grows less from year to year. We never
did much believe in it. Few of our ancestors
really sought it and it is hard to harmonize with
[ 102 ]

THE ESSENCE OF AMERICANISM

efficiency and perhaps impossible in a democracy.
There is little place for it in an industrialized
society that reckons values more readily on the
cash register than in the depths of moral medita-
tion or the ecstasy of aesthetic flutter.

Visibly our grasp on the older cultural values
weakens from year to year. They do not fit our
scheme of things. They demand a multi-coloured
society of individuals which would destroy our
social pattern. In denying them we are defend-
ing our religion and our hopes. Tolerance is
not an American virtue and humility is becoming
rarer.

What we do offer — in ever more limited amounts
— is entrance into our society and a share of its
benefits to all who see things as we do. The
American scene undoubtedly comes nearer to the
ideal of the average man and woman — gives
greater scope to the average powers — than any
more mature social milieu (whether the price
we pay for this is not too high is another matter).
But if our ideal is really the “ greatest happiness
of the greatest number ”, it is difficult to see how
we can do better than this. It is my conviction
that the American life, with its numerical and

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THIS AMERICAN WORLD

quantitative and machine-made standards, its
carelessness of the finer distinctions and ambi-
tions of the spirit, its generous materialism, its
firm belief in Natural Equality, adequately
expresses humanity at the present moment. This
life is the unconscious yet logical creation of a
mediocracy, here, for the first time in a thousand
years, dominant in a developed society.

This does not mean that America is, in every-
day practice, governed in the interest of the
majority, but that its ruling class is larger, more
closely akin to and in harmony with the ideals
of the masses than has ever before been the
case.

The early pioneer had transformed the wilder-
ness into a physically civilized and settled land.
As they and their leaders were of the same mental
type, with the same moral and intellectual limita-
tions, there was absolutely nothing to prevent
them from making the United States as they
saw fit. The American mediocracy is hindered
by no tradition, no loud-voiced and unsettling
intellectuals, and no hampering material priva-
tions, from creating a society in its own image.
The foreign proletarians find this delightful.

[104]

THE ESSENCE OF AMERICANISM

At home they had, in imitation of their cultured
leaders, developed a certain number of domestic
arts, etc., admired by high-brows. In Italy
peasants still read tales of knights and ladies —
Orlando and the “ Kings of France ” and Geno-
veffa — ^which they learned to love when chivalry
was supreme. But let the peasants lay hands on
the Saturday Evening Post, and farewell to
Genoveffa. In America the peasant reads of
farmer boys who became Presidents, and votes
for Coolidge ; the pea-nut-merchant chuckles
over shrewd and chivalrous merchant-paladins
who black the eyes of effete artists and villainous
foreigners, carry off the prizes of fortune and
marry the prettiest girls.

With this attitude goes naturally a suspicion
of all things European. In order to get on with
us, the immigrant has only to get over every
trace of his foreign ways and forget his mother
tongue.

Cultured Europeans have still no adequate
conception of the drawing power of Americanism.
It constitutes the strongest apostolic force in the
modern world and perhaps the only one that can
successfully dispute the future with Russian

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THIS AMERICAN WORLD

communism. Perhaps our greatest asset is our
intense belief in our own ideals, in our essential
rightness, — a belief we suffer no foreigners or
domestic intellectuals to disturb. On this account
our very imperialism has a quality of its own.
If the various Central American peoples ran their
country as we do ours, they would still be in full
enjoyment of their political independence. It is
not as victims or inferiors that we mistreat and
despoil them ; it is as heretics whose misfortune
it is to live in disturbing proximity to such an
unrivalled society as ours — and seeing the light,
to deny it.

[ io6]

Ill

EUROPE BEFORE THE WAR

I

E urope has so long been supreme in the
world’s affairs that it is hard for its inhabi-
tants to realize that the time spirit has gone else-
where. For about a thousand years the peoples
east of Russia and the Balkans have developed an
organic and personal civilization which, during
its heyday, they imposed on a large part of the
world. This latter achievement is unique in
history and very naturally it created among its
actors and their descendants a collective feeling of
something like immortality.

Although the component European peoples
were amazingly varied, without a common past,
entering the civilization itself at different mo-
ments, they had the enormous advantage of a
common church, the Roman Catholic, and a

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THIS AMERICAN WORLD

common political allegiance, the Empire, that
strange amalgam of m 5 rth, memory and reality.
Therefore they grew easily into a unified whole.
Almost from the start, the more gifted leaders
seemed conscious of their European task. The
Italians, superficially Germanized and with only
too much history, seemed hardly of the same
nature as the barely Romanized Teutons or the
Moor-ridden Spaniards, who had next to none.
But their soldiers mixed in the same Crusades,
whose motives were incomprehensible and ridicu-
lous to half outsiders like the Venetians, astride
of two cultures. Together the European peoples
transformed early Western Catholicism into shapes
more harmonious with their own nature, and cut
it loose from the formalized Eastern Church.
And though formal religious unity was lost with
the Reformation, there remained a common
manner of belief, a common way of looking at
basic things.

Each component folk had, to be sure, an
individuality of its own, and each in turn took
up the common work most enthusiastically at the
period best suited to its own accomplishments.
But influences foreign to the group — traces of

[io8]

EUROPE BEFORE THE WAR

Byzantine architecture or religious Arianism, for
instance — ^were soon eliminated. And later de-
fence, against the Moors and Mongols and Turks,
was comparatively easy for geographical reasons.
When finally, the classical heritage of the Mediter-
ranean sifted in through Arabs and Greeks, it
met characters so firmly formed that the classical
knowledge rather than the recipients underwent
transformation. Assimilation was painless.

Early European wars, being mostly personal,
left internal things unchanged. But even the
intense, national wars of later periods proved
incapable of destroying the European family.

Therefore one can hardly deny the existence
of a united European civilization with an indwel-
ling identity about which generalizing is legiti-
mate. Since the ninth or tenth century, since
Charlemagne, there has existed here something
individual and historically organic. Religion,
politics, art, commerce, science and engineering
unfolded along one and the same line and were
co-operatively strong. European theology and
philosophy were thrashed out in the European
councils. Not a country but contributed some-
thing. When in the explosion of the Renaissance

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THIS AMERICAN WORLD

the migratory urge appeared, it was all over
Europe at once. Portugal, Spain, England, Hol-
land, and France might conquer and colonize and
dispute the booty ever so fiercely among them-
selves, the civilization that remained abroad was
European. To the Arabs in Palestine all the
Crusaders, whatever their nation, were “ Franks ”.
It is probable that until very recently intelligent
Chinese found the various European peoples as
much alike as the many peoples of China appear
to Western eyes.

Of course there has been steady development.
The political ideas of the Roman Curia at the
Council of I’rent were hardly those of the British
Labour Party to-day. But despite continuous
change, European society has developed organi-
cally from stage to stage, preserving an inner
unity that, along the analogy of art, can best be
described as a style.

This means that at a given moment the thought,
religion, art, manners, dress, economic structure
and social emphasis tend to proceed from a
common centrifugal spirit, of which they are the
vital manifestations.

Therefore style proceeded out of style, slowly

[ no]

EUROPE BEFORE THE WAR

and apparently inevitably. Gothic superseded
Romanesque and gave place to Renaissance and
Baroque, each in its turn sweeping over nearly
the entire territory under European sway, and
treating preceding styles with an almost contemp-
tuous brutality. Modern aesthetes shudder to dis-
cover how the inventors of “ baroque horrors ”
remodelled earlier masterpieces, burying price-
less trecento frescoes under plain white plaster.
But precisely in their vandalism the seventeenth
century artists demonstrated how vital they were.
So long as it is organically creative, a society never
doubts its own taste. Individual artists consider
themselves original when they are really creating
the common appropriate style. Victorianism,
which is an English name for something that
existed all over Europe, is not highly considered
to-day, but the Victorians, with few exceptions,
were as much convinced of the rightness of their
productions as were the creators of Gothic cathe-
drals. For Victorianism was still a centrifugal style
of life.

2

The essence of civilization is mysterious . Obvi-
ously it is not entirely a matter of factors like

[III]

THIS AMERICAN WORLD

blood, bodily conformation, climate and ground
topography. Nor are common history and lan-
guage entirely decisive. Rather a civilization
seems the embodiment of certain formative ideas,
of a certain view of life, a mental being, with the
progressive development of which it comes into
being, blooms, fades, is destroyed or stagnates.

No matter how productive its past or physically
virile its population, the society at one moment
becomes sterile. Real style ceases to exist and
its place is taken by utilitarian opportunism.
The centrifugal energy is directed by its own
momentum into increasingly external channels.
Inwardly, there is doubt, hesitancy, the feeling
about for foreign stimulant. Inner vacuity soon
begins to be filled with miscellaneous borrowings
from abroad. Productive activity shrinks to ever
fewer fields, in each of which it endeavours, for a
while, to make up for lack of real soul by skill
and size and extension.

Art, being supersensitive, first shows the decline.
No art in full bloom is tolerant, for tolerance
leads to eclecticism. At the same time, with
the decline of organic belief, growing rationalism
asks of art the same justification that it demands

[112]

EUROPE BEFORE THE WAR

of everything else. So long as a society is creative
no one affirms or denies the value of art. For
art is both natural and ultimate, like religion.
Where it comes to exist only under duress or
neglect, where it persists as “ pure form ” or
“ absolute music ” or dwindles to decoration and
erudite tone combination, there is little to express
left ; where its impulses are driven into other
fields, there is maladjustment and decline ; where
it ceases altogether the formative ideas are impo-
tent and their function is performed by reason.

This means a decay of the social forms, but by
no means of the civilization as such. Outwardly
things may appear to be much as they were or
even to be improving. Education increases and
the energy previously concentrated around the
internally productive centres may appear to be
suddenly liberated for the great tasks of the outer
world, construction, sanitation, hygiene, comfort
and the extension of the general benefits to the
masses. Convenience, business, engineering,
mass amusements, become all important matters
and are provided for with a lavishness of effort
and skill far beyond the powers or desires of earlier
generations.

[” 3 ]

H

THIS AMERICAN WORLD

Engineering and medicine supplant state-craft
and philosophy. It is not the busy hands, but
the spirit that falters and imitates itself.

State and administrative structure, organizing
power, military science may greatly outrun preced-
ing decades and centuries. It is the belief in
the State that weakens. The body, carefully
cultivated and enjoyed, receives more attention
and is expected to yield far more satisfaction.
But the chief interest of the crowd is not lavished
on the physical culture of beauty but on the suc-
cessful champion, the professional athlete.

Moreover, since the component nations of a
civilization are rarely gifted in the same way or
to the same degree, it is almost impossible for
them to maintain under new conditions and
new contests, the established rank of achievement.

Early in the nineteenth century, or perhaps
about the time of the American and French
Revolutions, European civilization, for the first
time in a millennium, began to show signs of
weariness. The older classes were decaying, the
older standards falling into disrepute under the
blows of reason. Bonaparte’s cyclonic career
hastened this process.

[ih]

EUROPE BEFORE THE WAR

About the same time there developed a vast
interest in the past and horizons began to widen.
Typical symptoms were historical research, arche-
ology, museums. Within a few decades scholar-
ship was rated above the creative mind and
education over spiritual achievement. Culture
ceased to grow and began to flatten. Religion was
attacked by emancipated intellects, happy in their
enfranchisement from “ prejudice ”. Now all
form is essentially prejudice, for it is exclusive.
It precludes all plastic possibilities but the one
it embodies. One may doubt if anything organic
can exist without prejudice.

Sculpture having ceased to mean anything
froze into ornament. Representative painting had
ceased to be a social necessity and was drooping
into decoration. Heroic literature was accounted
rhetoric. Music, the slowest of the arts, was
mustered up by Wagner to a last glorious debauch.

The forms which collectively make a style were
badly cracked. Some time it may be possible
to put a finger on a definite date and declare it
to mark the end of the last European Lebensstil.

By the end of the century the situation was clear.
It was not merely that in literature realists and

[IIS]

THIS AMERICAN WORLD

symbolists were calling names while prophets
were shouting for the “ new beauty of indus-
trialism The creative force was clearly failing,
the spirit becoming wilted and corrupt. There
were small signs of a new apocalypticism. With
it went pose and pessimism, apparent enough in
such important types as Oscar Wilde and August
Strindberg. Half-breeds from the Balkan and
near-Asiatic periphery swelled the capitals, and
their slight exoticism was welcomed. Egyptian
architecture and sculpture, Russian folk art,
technical novelties from the United States, were
beginning to inspire the century-old exponents
of European culture. Finally there came an
attempt to aestheticize the new industrial material,
which artistically could only result in an inter-
esting but culturally unimportant flourishing of
craft. Artists became depressed and savage.
To recapture the lost power they had recourse
to the treasures of historical research. Artistic
power is fundamental ; therefore — they argued —
it could be recaptured by consciously recreating
primitive states of mind as eml)odied in Negro
rhythm and sculpture. The result was the vast
movement, splendid and hopeless, known as

[n6]

EUROPE BEFORE THE WAR

Expressionism — z heroic submission of the over-
civilized European spirit to a kind of Steinach
operation. Less stalwart artists, conscious of
their futility, gave expression to their pain in the
irony of Dadaism, and had a last laugh at their
pitiless but puzzled public. After this nothing
was left but sober, gallant acceptance of the new
democratic utilitarian standards, or a logical
renunciation of the arts. This had been the
choice of the boy poet Arthur Rimbaud, who
having written masterpieces, felt the futility of
poetry before he was twenty and left off writing
for an adventurous business career.

For with the control of society attained by
the middle class in the nineteenth century, the
real ruler was money. For the first time in many
centuries business became an end in itself and
the trader his own justification. The effect of
this change, in all departments, was to hasten
the natural process.

At the same time all through life there developed
a heightened interest in the psychic zone, in
the hope that, it would somehow turn out to
contain the source of the lost faith and creative

power.

["?]

THIS AMERICAN WORLD

3

Still the social tradition was powerful and its
momentum enormous. Only gradually Europe
realized its plight.

Except for the prophetic few, life was sweet
in Europe in the days before the war. The
combination of the new technique and vastly
wider knowledge, the promises and realizations
of science, better living conditions, the increase
in riches and population within the frame of a
mature society that still seemed to preserve the
older cultural values while firmly believing in the
future, had a delicate charm one must have ex-
perienced to understand. Science, historical re-
search, democratic control, abundant money,
seemed so many instruments destined not to
destroy but inestimably to enrich the old organic
life.

One travelled as easily as and far more cheaply
than to-day, but a trip was still something of an
adventure. Horizons were theoretically wide and
books of travel popular, but men were still
anchored in the tradition of a single land and
submissive to its standards. Cosmopolitanism

[ii8]

EUROPE BEFORE THE WAR

was limited to international aristocrats, waiters,
barbers and a very few business men and journa-
lists.

Business had not yet thrown off its traditional
humility or finance advanced its claim for decisive
power. Outwardly the statesman did not admit
his dependence on the oil magnate or place the
state machinery, the army and the naval des-
troyers, so unashamedly at the latter’s disposal.

Socialism was a dream of a happier humanity,
not an organization of human white ants. The
socialist leaders were exceptional men who in
aiming at bread for everyone had not forgotten
the need for roses.

Anarchy within so charming a frame had all
the attraction of stage thunder.

Politics were less bitter in spite of the class
struggle and the traditional rivalry between
nations. Diplomacy under the new economic
imperialism could not indeed and did not really
seek to lay the spectre of war. But peace seemed
so thorough and so established that none but
statesmen, cynics and students of history could
really believe that the old volcanic instincts were
not finally extinct. Why should anyone fight
[” 9 ]

THIS AMERICAN WORLD

when all were so relatively prosperous ? And
when thoughts of war did arise they took the form
of colonial struggles surprisingly tender to normal
life, or even of romantic battle scenes like the
canvases of Delacroix.

Religion was bitterly criticized and much dis-
cussed. Rationalism was gaining ground steadily.
There was a church problem in nearly every state
and a few fanatics uttered periodical jeremiads
about the peril of religion or of irreligion (accord-
ing to their point of view). But fundamental
problems had not become a matter of indifference.

All the arts were assiduously cultivated and
few persons suspected how little they had come to
matter. Society, stratified though it was, paid
homage to the author, and the sculptor received
more consideration than the engineer. Famili-
arity with the contents of the libraries and the
art museums was thought essential to genuine
education. Life had its little amenities.

And its intensities of thought. There were still
people ready to divorce over aesthetic theories or
to die for personal liberty. Society, despite the
ancient cruelties, was organic and not yet organized.
Men were less on each other’s nerves. Things

[I20]

EUROPE BEFORE THE WAR

moved slowly and people had the illusion of a
freedom and the dreams of an unlimited progress
hard to imagine in Europe to-day.

Incomes were low but so were expenses.
Everyone who willed had time to think. Business
was slow to take advantage of opportunities to
increase profits by changes disturbing to general
comfort. Individualism was strong and person-
ality respected. The spiritual values still received
lip service even from the masses, and few dared
to suggest that a king or priest or poet was a man
like everybody else, whose exceptional immunity
from common burdens must be justified in terms
acceptable to the crowd, or eliminated. Few
foresaw that democracy might turn out to be a
kind of tyranny : even fewer that the masses
were indeed in possession of the machinery but
that an unseen hand had cut off nearly all con-
ceivable sources of inner power.

The future was conceived as a fairer edition
of an already well-read book.

Within the framework of state and class,
European socjpty was a bright fabric of little
worlds, each a law unto itself. There were defi-
nite classes. The ancient nobility — dispossessed

[I2I ]

THIS AMERICAN WORLD

in France but eminently distinguished and strong
in the army ; democratic and self-indulgent in
Italy ; sporting and awe-inspiring in Britain ;
fossilized in Spain and still authoritative in Cen-
tral and Eastern Europe — on the whole held aloof
from all but exceptionally attractive women of
the other classes. The rich middle classes with
old established traditions and the new industrial
leaders formed what was called the “ great
bourgeoisie ”, who on one side somewhat timidly
came into touch with the nobility and on the
other, with the professional classes, who in turn
looked down on merchants and traders. The
business or shopkeeping bourgeoisie, together with
the lesser employers, were themselves a class,
somewhat contemptuous of the artisans, greatly
contemptuous of the peasants — small farmers or
tenants — who answered in kind. A few artisans
remained aloof from the developing proletariat of
shop and factory workers, and, mindful of their
places in a God-ordained world, voted conserva-
tively.

Brighter threads through the whole were the
artists, intensely conscious of their high mission,
equalled in pride by the nobility alone and reserv-

[122]

EUROPE BEFORE THE WAR

ing their supreme contempt for the money-
grubbing middle classes. This was neither a
pose nor a joke ; the artists realized the superiority
of achievement in a field where only natural
vocation can guarantee success, and honestly
scorned the possessors of mere money. Closely
akin to them were the intellectuals — professional
teachers, independent thinkers, a few physicians
and lawyers and government employees, less
proud than the artists, but consciously superior
to the factory owners and theatre managers.

Women were the chief social amalgam. An
artist might marry a peasant woman or an actress
or the daughter of a rich industrialist or even a
countess — and society accepted the choice. Mes-
alliances in all classes were comparatively common.

But although the artists presented an almost
united front to the middle classes (from whom
they mostly sprang), among themselves they were
divided into smaller professional groups that were
in turn split into numberless schools and cliques.
The painters consorted with the sculptors, but
neither group knew much about the writers,
while the musical world formed a closed and very
haughty unit into which it was difficult for out-

[123]

THIS AMERICAN WORLD

siders to penetrate, but which through the singers
came in touch with the theatre and through the
orchestra conductors with God. The moving
picture actor was practically unknown, and the
broadcasting singer or violinist entirely unknown.

On the whole it was an age of higher intel-
lectual, artistic and social standards than to-day.
The lawyer might frequent the “ world ” or the
“ half world ” according to his temperament, but
neither had become the haunt of climbers and
money makers, who reserved their talents for more
limited spheres.

It was a society with more modest worldly
ambitions, but far greater claims to integrity and
inner power. How could its members realize
that across the sea lay a newer, fresher country
that, offshoot of Europe though it was, had
already outstripped the parent trunk in its easy
acceptance and fulfilment of the coming way of
life?

4

And then the war came. For fpur and a half
years the life of normally sensitive human beings
was made up of horror, pain, sorrow, tedium and

[124]

EUROPE BEFORE THE WAR

weariness . The genius of material progress showed
itself as compounded of forces as readily utilizable
for inhuman as for creative purposes. Such a
war could have been conceived and executed
only by an emancipated reason that trod upon the
social taboos, without which, in some form, no
civilization is ultimately conceivable. When after
the war men searched for what was left, the old
forms were in ruins and the old sanctities had
gone.

Externally society seemed much what it had
been before, despite political revolutions. Prac-
tically, something precious to the European mind
had been shattered. Gigantic new forces hovered
over the debris. Impressive by bulk and power
as they were, to the European mind they seemed,
and not without reason, soulless, mechanical,
drab, undistinguished. So while the European
masses, so far as war-poverty would allow,
accepted readily whatever satisfaction was offered
without asking whence it came, the better spirits,
especially if they had long held high the banner
of the spirit^, cursed the strange new genius
which they failed to realize as the same that had
for a long time been growing up within their

[125]

THIS AMERICAN WORLD

own no longer handsome mansions. Thanks to
a historical accident, this new genius became
known as Americanism.

5

Much has been written of conflicts between
historical opposites. But such conflicts hardly
exist outside the contemplating human mind.
Historically a period is always true to itself.

Had Europe been in its prime, we may affirm
that neither majority rule nor the onslaught of
profiteers nor any amount of technical develop-
ment could have compelled it to undesired modes
of life. But it must also be asked whether majority
rule or technique could possibly have been
developed other than as they were — by a society
in which older, more aristocratic values were in
slow decay.

Historically neither democracy nor technical
science did violence to the spirit of the civilization.
They were themselves the latest children of that
spirit.

What Europe called Americanism was not
really alien to Europe in any sense, save that
of geography. This Americanism is largely
[ 126]

EUROPE BEFORE THE WAR

the outcome of European self-deception. In
new America mass rule and machine standards
were furthered by the prevailing ideals and had
reached high development because they met no
traditions with which to contend. The United
States were obviously majority-ridden, uncul-
tured, industrialized, unaesthetic, utilitarian.
Europe was travelling toward the same goal but
more slowly and behind the mask. When the
mask fell, the Europeans saw their latest selves :
they preferred to think they were seeing the face
of the United States.

[ 127]

IV

EUROPE BECOMES
AMERICANIZED

I

T o the idealist with a thirst for realization
this is a brutally refractory world. For
after thousands of years’ instigation to peace and
self-conquest, it is still impressed by nothing
quite so much as by military triumph. It is not
that the masses want war : few people ever want
war. But military activity stirs such deep places
in the human heart that the conquering soldier
knows no rival in popular prestige, if only his
success be dazzling enough. Brilliance is essen-
tial ; it was not homely republican Rome which
dazzled the world— it was the visibly triumphant
Empire of plundered province and plutocracy.
Not the fear but the glamour of Islam’s vic-
torious scimitar converted men wholesale to Allah.

1 128]

EUROPE BECOMES AMERICANIZED

Military triumph always carries its prestige
over into other fields. In the period of their
successes, Spanish pikemen and Colonial con-
quistadores spread Spanish culture and customs
throughout Europe. A hundred years later it
was the turn of France. For a whole century
there was hardly a reigning princeling but sought
to reflect some small radiance of the Roi-Soleil.
When, after a series of smaller successes, Britain
finally downed Napoleon, it acquired not only
territory but French prestige as well. Its pre-
eminence lasted until 1870, when Germany gave
France a drubbing, and blossomed out as a
pattern for the world.

What is plainer in American history than
the cultural drawing power of military success ?
Time after time we have elevated generals to the
presidency and have responded with scientific
regularity to military history abroad. In the
eighteenth century, many American colonists,
indifferent to their language and prevailing English
origin, gave their preference to French culture.
Waterloo taugjit us to look to English models
and there ensued the period of Emerson and
Hawthorne. But soon after 1870 Gennany be-

[129] 1

THIS AMERICAN WORLD

came our cynosure. German music (fortunately)
and German literature (quite improperly) were
extolled above all others. German historical
method half eclipsed the common-sense English
school of sociology (in many ways so naturally
akin to our mental habits). German philosophy
closed our eyes to speculative thought elsewhere.
Our physicians discovered that Berlin was really
a finer place for study than Vienna. German
pedagogues were lured to professional perches
in the United States, and proceeded to lecture
us on our lack of Geist. And not alone the cul-
ture of Germany found unending and compre-
hensible admiration. Germany had whipped
France : therefore her centralized system of
municipal government with appointed Oberbur-
germeister must be just what our cities needed ;
even the preposterous half-absolutism of the
Kaiser found American disciples. No amount
of Rhodes scholars or exchange professors from
France could shake the belief of the American
professors and a large share of the American
people in German superiority — ^until the Great
War. Then it was no time before they discovered
a fact hitherto negligible : that German life and

[130]

EUROPE BECOMES AMERICANIZED

education were organized to the ideals of a social
and political order almost completely hostile to
our own — ^and honest German scientists and
brilliant musicians were brutally hounded home-
ward or into poverty. But had Germany and her
allies won the war within the first six months ? . . .

First and foremost, it is as the military power
that successfully raised millions of armed men
from the ground at Myrmidon speed, brought
them to Europe through infested seas and gave
the coup de grace to mighty Germany that America
to-day impresses most of the world. Add to
military prestige our visible triumphs in the
scarcely less esteemed realms of machinery and
organized economics — our mechanics and our
money — and it is clear why the United States to-
day are coming to impose their style of life on
both Europe and Asia — and are loved and hated
accordingly. “ Vincere ”, said Machiavelli in a
phrase that is worth many books — “ vincere fu
sempre mirabiV com ”,

America’s prestige rose at the very moment
when Europe had become conscious of its depen-

[131]

THIS AMERICAN WORLD

dence on the values America seemed more success-
fully to incorporate. In fact America perfected
those later developments in finance, industry and
technique worthy of imitation, during the early,
or “ neutral American ” period of a war that
was to weaken Europe’s chief obstacle to Ameri-
canization.

Capitalism, technique and democracy were
all imported into the United States from Europe.
But their offspring, industrialism, whose essence,
according to Bertrand Russell, “ is the expenditure
of much labour upon things which are not them-
selves consumable commodities, but merely means
to the production of commodities which are con-
sumable ”, can best flourish in a country classless
enough to accept standardized products and lavish
enough in consumption to keep the machines
running full time. Where the producers’ men-
tality is substantially one with the consumers’, the
industrial system can be developed almost with-
out limit. The country that most lavishly pro-
vides the requisites for this system is the United
States. ,

In Europe industrial development is still hob-
bled by feudal habits and national traditions that

[132]

EUROPE BECOMES AMERICANIZED

make for industrial stagnation. Technique has
consistently been hampered by venerable aesthetic,
moral, guild and labour tradition, and mass pro-
duction has run contrary to the prevailing indi-
vidualism and class division.

A large part of the European masses are still
under the influence of their ancient habits and
tastes. In many sections of this so checkered
continent, old-time native costumes are still worn.
In Albania and other portions of the Balkans, in
Poland, the Wendish Spreewald near Berlin,
Bavaria, small regions in the Black Forest, Austria,
Hungary, Slovakia, Sicily, Spain, Brittany and
doubtless many other parts, the traditional dress
is still common. In Italy most furniture and a
great deal of the pottery and the dishes are made
by hand. The old arts and crafts are alive
commercially and not merely, as in England, as the
delight of aesthetes. This constitutes a dimin-
ishing but very real obstacle to mass production.
And there is the national obstacle as well. “For
the old continent to adapt itself completely to
the hencefortl^ necessary conditions of large-
scale industrial organization, it would have, not
only to suppress its economic frontiers, which

[133]

THIS AMERICAN WORLD

only too often separate the raw stuffs from the
factory and the latter from the consumers, but
to get rid of the political frontiers that perpetuate
distinct levels and civilizations side by side.”
In Poland and parts of Germany peasants still
respectfully kiss the hand of gentleman land-
owners. A great part of the otherwise progres-
sive German industry seems feudally organized
and managed.

Throughout Europe those who have money
seek individual expression in their houses, furni-
ture and motor cars, just as they hope for it in
their children. In Germany and Italy the old
guild tradition is still alive and does much to
prevent the introduction of (often inferior but
usually cheaper) mass-made articles.

Almost more powerful is the aesthetic and intel-
lectual tradition. Whatever his political creed,
almost every cultured European has his aristo-
cratic tastes and standards that depend upon
differentiation from the mob. Often he is some-
thing of a snob — he makes a definite if unconscious
effort not to appear in any respegt like those he
regards as his inferiors. Naturally he opposes
all levelling forces, and particularly those which

[134]

EUROPE BECOMES AMERICANIZED

couple standardized products with the unpleasant
qualities of commercialism.

Western Europe is tired. “ The life energy
of European humanity seems no longer to be
up to the crazy speed of the wheels and would
like to regain control of the loosened demons
of the machines. And indeed this mood is not
confined to the working class alone. People
long to be out of the fantastically keyed activity
of the metropolises that threaten to destroy body
and soul, and get back to a quieter procedure.
They would prefer to renounce an industrial
development stretching into the infinite in favour
of a stationary situation.”

And for all this the process called Americani-
zation goes steadily forward.

3

What the European means by Americanization
is simply the adoption of an)rthing typically
American,

When a Frenchman installs steam heat ; or
an Italian drinks a cocktail instead of a vermouth ;
or an Englishman says “ I guess ” ; or a Pole
purchases a motor tractor ; or a Spaniard chews

[135]

THIS AMERICAN WORLD

gum (called chicle ) ; or a German produces a
motor car in series or hurries over his lunch — he is
convinced he is being American.

And in this sense Europe is already pretty
thoroughly Americanized.

4

Already the day of, let us say, a prosperous
European business man is full of hardly realized
contacts with the United States.

He begins the morning in an American-style
bathroom and shaves with an American safety
razor or a European copy of it. Over breakfast
he reads a newspaper with information often
supplied by American news agencies and whose
composition is increasingly influenced by American
models. In all probability it contains advertise-
ments of American-made commodities . The motor
car in which he goes to his office has a fair chance
of having been made in the United States.

At the office, his adding and reckoning machines
are usually American. If he works in a store the
cash registers were probably made in Da5rton,
Ohio.

In many European cities working hours have

[136]

EUROPE BECOMES AMERICANIZE

been shortened, and he takes only a few minutes
in the middle of the day to lunch a Vamericaine.
If very modern he may consume half a Florida-
grown grape fruit. After lunch, over a Cuban
cigar, his topic of conversation with his friends
will possibly be the effect of further American
loans on European economy.

If young and a bachelor, he goes at five to a
dance palace and for an hour moves his legs in a
manner native to Harlem, New York, to the sound
of words written by American Jews on tunes
native to American Negroes.

Before supper he takes one or more American
cocktails. Dinner is still thoroughly European,
therefore excellent. But the subsequent moving
picture (American in invention) has a fifty per
cent chance of being American turned : the
regular play a fair chance, particularly in Great
Britain.

Should he prefer a card party, the game selected
can well be poker, a purely American production.

And as he passes through the city streets on
his way homeward it is almost certain that from
some roof or corner an electric sign will flash
out an American greeting.

[137]

THIS AMERICAN WORLD

5

The American influence on European dress is
not at first very obvious, but it is present in
numerous small ways, particularly in men’s cloth-
ing. American hats can be bought in any Euro-
pean capital, just as foreign productions are widely
sold in the United States. I do not know whether
it is thanks to the American influence that the
Bowler hat, never a favourite with us, has so
largely disappeared. A special American collar
fabric, or its European imitation, is coming to be
generally worn. The open or coat shirt came
from the United States and can be had every-
where, though I am told that some conservative
Europeans still prefer the ancient tubular variety
that can only be entered through the bottom.

Under American influence there is a tendency
in Europe to discard the waistcoat when the
weather permits, but it is still weak. The
European male likes to feel plenty of fabric
around the middle of his body ; perhaps it is
for this reason that until recently he has worn his
trousers close up to his arm-pits. To-day, under
American influence, hip length trousers are avail-

[138]

EUROPE BECOMES AMERICANIZED

able, at least in large cities, and belts are commonly
worn, even when their work is still done by the
venerable braces. The European considers the
belt as he does the League of Nations — aesthetically
desirable but not entirely to be trusted.

The type of underwear originally known by
three letters is also of American origin, I am told.
Many well-to-do Europeans affect it. I know of
nothing the United States has contributed to
socks, but American shoes are much sold through-
out the world.

To sum up, in men’s dress, the prevailing
European styles are English in origin, but modi-
fied in numerous small ways under American
influence.

It is far more difficult to speak of women’s
attire, if only because styles change more rapidly
and radically than with men. Paris fashion seems
still in the ascendancy. I am told on good
authority that the tastes of American women have
not directly affected the creations of French
dressmakers. American women buyers play,
however, a s^ective role : those tentative French
models tend to become styles that meet the
approval of New York. Vogue in the American

* [139]

THIS AMERICAN WORLD

edition influences well-dressed women throughout
Europe. But even in women’s clothes the influ-
ence of Great Britain is strong : sweater fabrics,
short skirts and bobbed hair can probably be
traced to English feminist pioneers.

The plucked eyebrow, a typically American
contribution to female beauty, fortunately failed
to make much headway in Europe.

6

American foodstuffs have hardly progressed on
the European tables. Paris, London and Berlin
have American restaurants and nearly everywhere
one can, with a little effort, obtain American
dishes. But the normal European does not eat
them. Excepting the grape fruit I can think of no
typically American viand Europe actually likes
— unless it be a fashion of serving hot lobsters
and shellfish. In this realm Europe seems really
unteachable. The European cuisine at its best
is superior to that of the United States, but cer-
tain American products, candies, ices, corn on the
cob, ought to have found gener^il hospitality
abroad and have not done so.

Whether it is American travellers or world-
r 140 1

EUROPE BECOMES AMERICANIZED

wide temperance or sports or a faster mode of
life that has brought water forward as a European
beverage I do not know. Some years ago it
was difficult to obtain permission to drink water
in any European restaurant or hotel. Now, such
idiosyncrasy is not only tolerated on the part of
Americans but also finds numerous European
disciples.

American bars and mixed drinks have con-
quered Europe completely. No English girl
thinks she has had a real night out unless she
begins it with a “ Clover Club ”, a “ Doctor ”
or a “ Martini dry ”. No hotel is complete with-
out an American bar. Even before prohibition
came to the help of European sellers of alcohol,
the “ American taste ” was carefully catered for
by hotels and cafes and cultivated by European
customers.

Non-alcoholic drinks have always existed in
Europe but have never been consumed in anything
like American quantities. It is notable that
Europeans prefer their own ginger beer and
grenadine a Veau and Himbeer Saft and liquorice
water to American offerings. The soda fountain
has not become popular. But the balance is still

[HI ]

THIS AMERICAN WORLD

on our side, for although it is next to impossible
to find Himbeer Saft in America, ice-cream soda
(of a kind) can be obtained in European capitals.

7

Gum-chewing was introduced by the American
army abroad and has made fair but variable
progress. In England it is a social disgrace : in
Berlin it was for a time a form of social distinction.
Now gum is chewed by the “ lower classes ” in a
few Dutch, Spanish, German and French towns
and is unknown in the country. But the American
manufacturer seems hopeful.

8

There is little or no American influence trace-
able in European household furniture. The
average European is convinced that the United
States is the home of every imaginable form of
bad taste and would never dream of inquiring
how Americans furnish their houses. But in the
matter of household conveniences, originally intro-
duced in the United States as a substitute for
failing personal service, Europe is eagerly imitat-
ing us. Vacuum cleaners, electric ice boxes,

[142]

EUROPE BECOMES AMERICANIZED

washing machines and numerous other forms of
domestic machinery tending to lighten the house-
work are gradually gaining a place, along with
convenient sinks and pleasant bathrooms.

In the matter of architecture it is slightly
diflFerent. The influence of American architects
is felt in house-planning in the matter of more
windows and better ventilation : this is really
only one form of an admitted deference to Ameri-
can superiority in most matters relating to sanita-
tion. I am told that the same superiority is
admitted and to some extent copied in hospitals.
But the skyscraper is a form of American architec-
ture that really impresses Europe. In some
countries, like France, skyscrapers are forbidden
by law. In others such as Germany, one or two
have been erected out of pure ambition in situ-
ations where there was no economic need for
them. Europe has been rather slow to discard
the old manner of building with brick and stone,
but concrete and steel are coming into their
own.

In architecture American influence is visible
chiefly in purely utilitarian processes of
engineering.

• [143 ]

THIS AMERICAN WORLD

9

Europe has always been ready to adopt pleasant
or useful articles, whatever the source, so long
as they fitted its own scheme of living, and called
for no real sacrifice. In this way it early acquired
coffee, tea, and tobacco. There was no tradition
of barbers strong enough to prevent the intro-
duction of the safety razor ; no trade union of
public scribes interested in boycotting type-
writers, although almost up to to-day many public
documents in France and Italy, to say nothing
of more backward countries, were painfully and
illegibly scribbled by hand. Sewing machines,
cash registers, accounting machines, doubtless
deprived many people of work, but they were so
useful that they forced an entrance long before
the war. Gramophones when cheap were irre-
sistible, like radio ; they appealed to the awakening
mass needs. Barbed wire has become the rule and
Pullman cars now run on several European lines.

Agricultural machinery met greater resistance
because expensive and because it threatened to
uproot the peasantry, in whose tradition and lack
of education fearful governments saw a guarantee

[144]

EUROPE BECOMES AMERICANIZED

of their own permanence and a fertile bed for the
necessary crops of soldiers. But the large land-
owners saw the point : agricultural machinery
was soon manufactured in Europe and is widely
used, though in Spain, Italy and the Balkans,
high tariffs allow the ox-plough to survive.

But these things make their own way and signify
little. It is different in matters of dress where
one fashion is really no better than another :
different in the imitation of things like skyscrapers
for which there is no real economic need : very
different in the preference given to American
moving pictures. For here we are dealing with
complicated but determinant psychological states.

lO

The supreme popularity of the American mov-
ing pictures is a subject for wrath and resentment
to any number of Europeans. The French, the
Germans, the Russians, the Italians and the
English are excited about it. For they very
rightly see in American films not only a hindrance
to the fortunes they might otherwise make from
their own, but a powerful means of “ national
propaganda ”. The English are particularly per-
’ [ H5 ]

K

THIS AMERICAN WORLD

turbed because the Colonies tend already to
gravitate more and more into the American orbit
and familiarity with every phase of American life
encourages the process. But if mass familiarity
converts, it does not explain the popularity of
these films : if the life shown were not naturally
sympathetic to the masses, not only of the British
colonies but of all Europe, familiarity would not
arouse any particular enthusiasm.

It is not superior photography, as the specialists
aver, that carries the American production into
the remote backwashes of the earth. Most people
understand little about technical niceties and care
rather less. Nor is general aesthetic quality
decisive. Some German and Russian films are
aesthetically as fine as the best America produces.
But neither at home nor abroad do they have
the whole-hearted success of the American pro-
ductions. California atmospheres are no finer
than those of Sorrento and though a pretty face
arouses quicker admiration than a sunset, no
nation has a monopoly of physical beauty. The
truth is that the American picture^ are made to
the spirit and measure of the masses — that in the
age of sport, machinery and mass rule, the United

[146]

EUROPE BECOMES AMERICANIZED

States embody the time spirit more exactly than
any other country and therefore the masses in
these other countries seek deliberately those (to
them) ideal conditions, that “ life according to
the heart’s desire ”, the American pictures so
sweetly portray. To speak of the primitive
quality of American films is ridiculous. The
American masses are probably less primitive than
those of Europe. They are merely freer to obtain
the type of “ art ” they really like ; the success of
this “ art ” in Europe simply shows that it is the
thing that everywhere appeals to the masses, so
soon as they are released from the paralysing
tradition of a culture that has outlived its virility.
The American films fit the public taste every-
where because they are cut to the measure of the
average human heart.

Much the same is true of the theatre, though
here language difficulties present something of an
obstacle. English critics complain that the Lon-
don theatres are clogged with bad American
plays. Doubtless they are right. But their real
complaint ought to be with the London public
that prefers these bad plays to the corresponding
British output.

[147]

THIS AMERICAN WORLD

II

Cultured people throughout Europe are de-
pressed by the fact that, in spite of increasing
education, the general mental level has sunk.
But here again they delude themselves. The
general intellectual level is probably higher.
Mental effort is merely directed into other more
practical and less spiritually satisfying channels.
Moreover, so long as the masses took none but
supers’ parts on the cultural stage, the performance
was subtler and more finished. But as the
change in mode of life brought ever larger partici-
pation in things that matter and industrialism
demanded wholesale financing and results, it
became impossible to maintain as actual or even
important the fine things to which only a few
people are ever capable of reaching. This is
not the fault of the United States but of the
historical development that produced applied
science, popular education and standardization.

Inevitably European entertainments are becom-
ing Americanized. For to the .popular mind
this change is attractive. The American news-
papers are not only more sensational and colourful

[1483

EUROPE BECOMES AMERICANIZED

but on the whole they are better newspapers,
giving a wider and fuller range of news as well as a
whole bazaar of side shows . The American maga-
zines that Europe has begun to copy are mediocre,
but they are better than the equivalent European
article when untouched by the American spirit.
The rather phenomenal success of cheap quality
American books can be traced to the liking for
American life prevalent nearly ever3rw'here, to a
desire to learn about the new country that has
so suddenly darkened the horizon, and to the
fact that of their kind the said American books
are more amusing than most of those written in
Europe.

For the best in everything, democracy implies
a levelling down. The treetops are ruthlessly
polled or droop from lack of nourishment.

American influence means ever more and more
fitting entertainment for the crowd. Amusement
parks, movies, depressingly long theatrical runs
of idiotic plays built about a money-mad chief
actor, jazz bands, radio listeners, dance mania and
sport take the place of the former popular enter-
tainments — ^watching the rich promenade and
perform in public life, stage melodramas, folk

* [ 149 ]

THIS AMERICAN WORLD

songs, band and orchestra concerts, military spec-
tacles, drinking and brawling. There is much
loss and considerable gain.

Europe follows the United States in motor
and radio madness. But at a distance. Motor-
cars are expensive and there are few amateur
mechanics : life is still organized about definite
family clumps planted in fixed spots. But the
organization is loosening and the clumps are
learning to pull up their roots and drift.

Radio fans are very numerous : they would be
more so were most European governments not so
fearsome and greedy and bureaucratic. Sending
stations on the Continent are a close monopoly
to be painfully watched less they spread subver-
sive propaganda ; a tax must be paid for listening
apparatus and there are still all sorts of formalities
to be complied with and blanks to be filled out.

12

Americanization means more business ; mass
production made economical by the rapid intro-
duction of existing improvements ; quantitative
standards with accurate and all embracing statis-
tics enabling supply, demand, cost, price and

[ 150 ]

EUROPE BECOMES AMERICANIZED

profits to be calculated as nicely as possible ;
reduction of types and standardization of product ;
quick turnover and changing fashions ; and,
most important of all, the furthering of con-
sumption by all possible means.

The unusual wave of commercial prosperity
in the United States which started during the
American neutrality period and has been rising
ever since, has not failed to attract the attention,
admiration and envy of Europe. One by one,
despite very high tariffs and serflike wages, the
European markets have been invaded by American
products. Such a menacing phenomenon de-
manded investigation by impoverished but none
too humble Europeans. In the last few years
innumerable investigations have been made. And
so far with small results. For here Americaniza-
tion runs counter to old and stubborn European
traditions and habits of thought.

To begin with, mass production means a
revolution in equipment. The rapid introduc-
tion of new machinery implies readiness to scrap
the old — ^and Europe never scraps anything. In
many cases it lacks the capital to install entirely
new equipment. Almost always it seems to lack

• [151 ]

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the elasticity of mind. Where the owner is ready
to “ rationalize ”, the workers, many of whom
might find themselves jobless in an over-populated
jungle, are not. Unemployment in Europe is a
tragedy, leading either to character wasting through
doles or to hunger verging on starvation. The
European masses are organized and in a way
powerful. Reduction of hands, even temporary,
meets their ferocious resistance.

The usurpation of qualitative by quantitative
standards rings in Europe like blasphemy. For
the best of European civilization has been built
upon quality. Europe has always prided itself
on fine work and individuality. Nowhere in the
world have the crafts reached higher level, no-
where have artists dreamed more greatly and
wrought more superbly. And art, almost always,
is individual. The artist thinks of the single
composition. Henry Ford looked at a Rem-
brandt. “ What’s the good of it ? there ain’t but
one of it,” he said. “ Multiply it by a million
and I’ll help you circulate it.” Europe wrought
for the few : America is ridden by^a passion for
universality.

Before the War, Guglielmo Ferrero published

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EUROPE BECOMES AMERICANIZED

a volume, Between the Two Worlds, in which he
foresaw the antithesis between a quantitative and
a qualitative civilization. This antithesis has
become a battle and quality, though perhaps only
for a time, has lost.

In the tradition of the guilds, industry was
half an art, not a branch of arithmetic. Some
European countries produce dependable statistics,
but not even they can bring themselves to reduce
the effort of business attainments to a few unro-
mantic diagrams. Yet the American puts into
his business life a romanticism the European still
(and perhaps wisely) keeps for more intimate
pleasures.

European individualism sullenly protests
against the reduction in number of available
types of merchandise required by cheaper stan-
dardized output. It not only limits producer
and consumer in the exercise of their free fancy
but damps the colour in an already somewhat
monotonous world. Even in commercial England
American attempts to introduce standardization
have failed, with one or two exceptions, and
thereby Britain’s industrial outlook becomes no
brighter. Yet standardization affects prices so

• [153]

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radically that it may win through in time. In
regimented Germany there is a private committee
associated with similar committees in other coun-
tries, which claims to have had success in reducing
the samples in many lines of business.

The principle of the quick turnover, small
profits but big sales, is most un-European.
Except in Great Britain, Europe has hardly known
a period of free competition and commercial
liberalism. Competition has usually been
national. The European merchant starts from
the principle that he must live. If custom
diminishes, he — raises the prices in order that
the total profit remain the same ! Price cartels
and agreements help him to do this. The
volume of business fails to swell as it should.

Changing fashions run counter to the some-
what avaricious mentality of the European buyer.

And finally, the favouring of consumption as
the basis of production is still very foreign to
European nature. In most countries the govern-
ment — ^itself delegated by wealth — ^aids a so-called
“ producers’ policy ” that puts the accent upon
the maker and not upon the consumer of goods.
The results are : tariffs, export premiums, freight

[154]

EUROPE BECOMES AMERICANIZED

rate preference, lofty indifference towards the
consumer (and in finance, toward the small
capitalist and stockholder) and relative indolence.

Since the War Europe has echoed with injunc-
tions to the workers to produce more : there
have been but few attempts to enable them to
consume more, and they with meagre success.
In Germany, for instance, five-and-ten-cent stores
report small results, because the merchant expects
too high a profit on each article. Therefore the
chief means to increased consumption have been
overlooked or belittled.

Advertising is not an American invention, and
I seem to remember a time before the War when
the English advertised almost as extensively as
the Americans. But that time is over. On the
continent, the hypnotizing influence of advertising,
the purpose of which is not so much to increase
as to direct consumption, has been neglected by
the very peoples who first developed and have
since gone furthest in the study of mass psychol-
ogy. Yet advertising is gradually coming into
its own, and in many countries has been carried
out in very ingenious ways.

On the contrary, nowhere in Europe has the

• [155]

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attention been paid to salesmanship that it per-
haps deserves. But this too will come.

In the matter of consumption financing or
instalment purchase systems, only Great Britain
has followed the United States on a large scale,
and apparently with great success. Both the
French and the Germans are very sceptical about
the soundness of this system which is just being
introduced into their countries ; learned experts
write profusely to prove that it is economically
unsound.^

And finally comes the all important question
of wages and prices. European wages are (1927)
notably smaller than in America ; in Great
Britain about half, in Germany about a third,
in many countries even less. European prices,
in gold currency countries, have a tendency to
rise well above the comparative wage level, and
often to equal those of the United States. Many
explanations are given : higher cost of raw
materials, smaller production, higher taxation,

^ In defence of Europe it should be stated that Europeans
deny the influence of the advertisement and the oily tongue
upon their own “ cultivated ” public : such things can only
work on primitive-minded Americans.

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EUROPE BECOMES AMERICANIZED

poverty among consumers. But an important
cause can be found in national psychology : the
European producers do not consider it quite
proper to reduce prices, and thereby to attract a
wider circle of buyers. Abroad they cut prices
with a will ; at home they lower them unwillingly,
grinding their teeth and murmuring ruin.

For lower prices and higher wages would place
the workers more nearly on the level of the
employers, would increase their strength in econo-
mic struggle, and irresistibly tend to destroy the
class system which, under all democratic sham
and reality, is the abiding desideratum of the
European rulers, both financial and political.

Still Americanism in all branches of business
and industry is present and popular throughout
Europe. Rotary clubs and other forms of com-
mercial back-scratching are spreading with sur-
prising rapidity. Department stores on the Amer-
ican model exist in most large cities. There is
talk of manufacturing a motor car in series even
in far away Barcelona. American business
periodicals are being imitated. Henry Ford’s
autobiography was translated into all languages,
and sold in Germany like a popular novel ;

• [157]

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many readers considered it the achievement of
the century. Once American business methods
seize on Europeans they seem to acquire a peculiar
frenzy, and it is rare to find a European with a
thorough business experience of the United States
who does not look upon his own countrymen
with a kind of indulgent superiority.

13

Few things in the world are more mysterious
than wealth. Short of military prestige, nothing
human has ever exerted a more binding fascin-
ation on the masses of mankind. There have
been brief periods when wealth was decried or
despised. They have not lasted long. Saint
Francis might for a few short years convert
thousands by the appeal of holy poverty ; his
successors built themselves monasteries worthy
of so great an Order, and Lady Poverty pined by
the wayside. On the covetousness of man, Karl
Marx erected his one-sided but impressive philoso-
phy. One cannot explain Greece on the basis of
economics. But Rome can be explained on no
other basis. Neither can capitalistic America.
Nor communistic Russia. Marx erred in neglect-

[IS8]

EUROPE BECOMES AMERICANIZED

ing other not less fundamental factors in human
life. A philosophy founded uniquely on cove-
tousness goes as far astray as one that, like Freud’s,
bases nearly all our conduct on sex. But
covetousness both of the flesh and the pocket,
along with a few other instincts, have been the
basis of human nature for as long as history
records. To-day, as in ancient Rome, the old
inhibitions have faded and the influence of wealth
has as steadily waxed. The United States embody
three forms of prestige — military strength, appeal-
ing to nearly every one, mechanical genius,
satisfying to the enfranchised reason, and financial
prestige, which means not only luxury but
dominion. For wealth is stored power.

When a European economist states that the
future of capitalism will be decided in the United
States, he pays tribute to American wealth. For,
on the one hand, only in America has capitalism
had a (relatively) unhampered development ;
while, on the other, the immediate future of
capitalism would seem to depend upon its capacity
to provide ^r all its members a satisfactory
material condition.

On the financial side, the United States appeal

• [159]

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to Europe in three forms : as a land where all
may be prosperous and the cleverest achieve
unlimited wealth ; as a symbol of a luxurious
and materially expansive existence ; as the dis-
perser of wealth and livelihood to other peoples
in the form of investments and loans.

No European policy, not even England’s, has
ever been so exclusively economic as that of the
United States. And therefore, in the age of
economics, America gropes unwillingly but surely
toward dominion. This is what Paul Val6ry
means when he writes, “ Europe will be punished
for its politics ; it will be deprived of its wines
and its beer, and of other things as well.”

Once the people of Europe migrated to the
United States to be free ; latterly they went to
become rich. Now the door is shut. Yet the
description of America as a land of “ unlimited
(economic) opportunity ” still carries faith in
Europe, along with the annoying conviction that
an American traveller is inevitably a millionaire.

To many Europeans American wealth means a
physically refined and luxurious type of existence,
cleaner, more comfortable and often more satis-
fying than the shabby artistic living of their own
[i6o]

EUROPE BECOMES AMERICANIZED

continent. Mechanics, wealth and easy trans-
portation have already created an international
type of human being — ^the person at home in any
large hotel in the world — ^and this being is,
according to Count Hermann Keyserling, “ Anglo-
Saxon As a matter of fact, he is more American
than English. The women who read Vogue are,
whether they know it or not, under the influence
of American wealth, since none but an opulent
and economic society could possibly have created
publications intended for entertainment, in which
the advertisements, both in interest and sumptuous
presentation, outdo the reading matter. In all
societies, with but insignificant rebellious inter-
vals, common people have aped the rich. In the
cosmopolitan era that has dawned, it is safe to
say that the European masses, so far as they
can, are constantly tempted to imitate the spend-
thrift descendants of plain-living Americans.

The influence of the United States as financier
is young in Europe, and none can say whether it is
destined to last. The present period of American
lending was determined by a specific and pre-
sumably none too frequent cause, namely the
destruction of working capital in Europe during

• [ i6i ] L

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the Great War. But whether or not these vast
over-populated societies can, in an age of increas-
ing mechanization and sharper competition, main-
tain or even regain their pre-war level is at least
open to question. As the richest, most numerous,
most economically developed, potentially most
powerful nation the United States are already
in a position to decide, if they choose, any number
of European questions. It is possible that, hav-
ing “ reconstructed ” Europe, our investing public
will withdraw its money for investment elsewhere.
But it is not likely. Already American capital is
interested in a number of large European banking
and business enterprises : in future such activity
might seem destined to increase. With it will
undoubtedly go an increase in the influence of
American wealth on Europe, particularly in
business organization, methods and mentality.
In the internationale of finance the money-lender
calls the tune.

14

A European in the United States is inevitably
struck by the speed, the hurry and the restlessness
of it all. He notes with annoyance and amuse-

[162]

EUROPE BECOMES AMERICANIZED

ment, that the average American takes vast joy
in what he calls saving time without being able
to say exactly for what it is being saved. Closer
observation shows that the American actually
does accomplish more in a given period than the
European. The average labourer produces more
in a day and reduction in working hours, save
in those domains where American labour aristo-
crats have decided otherwise, does not usually
mean lessened output.

Contrariwise, the American active in Europe
is continually annoyed by the stubborn indiff-
erence of the inhabitants to speed. As a rule
they cannot be hurried, and though their working
hours are on the average longer than those in
America, their results fail to justify such pro-
longed attention.

There can be little doubt but that the American
speed is influenced by and is more harmonious
with an age of high power machinery. But this
American tempo, while it fascinates and frightens
the European, used to his ease and his reverie,
has not yet made itself very evident. For it
grates on ancient habits and perhaps on a con-
scious scale of values.

• [163]

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The same is true of our American rootlessness.
Most Americans have no home ; that is, they are
at home in any American city of the size to which
they are accustomed. The pioneer tradition of
wandering has been so encouraged by the motor
car that we seem to be in the process of creating
a new type of social life. For there can be no
doubt that of all physical influences, that of the
fixed abode, the physical and spiritual roots of
successive generations fast in some one particular
spot, is perhaps the most potent in determining
the mental and even the physical human being.
But how can topographical heredity, the home
environment or even climate, influence men who
are born on the plains, study in the mountains,
settle in New England and winter in Florida or
Southern California ? The domestic airplane,
whose shadow is already upon us, will allow
unlimited mobility. One can assume that men
will be different.

But in Europe most of the people still grow
up and die close to the place of their birth, imbib-
ing a number of mystical influences from the
fact that they are not merely themselves, but
obviously and before all the world, belong to such

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EUROPE BECOMES AMERICANIZED

a group and locality. And this feeling of being
one with the past confers a sort of family esprit
de corps, and while it retards their development,
it reinforces their personality and character.
In a rootless society a man can be but himself,
at home everywhere or nowhere. Therefore,
conservative Europe rebels at the increasing
rootlessness. For were the old European society
not already moribund, this one social trait, if
acquired, would strike it to death.

Where local roots wither, the family and its
traditional unity cannot long survive. In Europe
the old patriarchal organization, the piling up of
the generations within the same circle and often
within the same walls, is still fairly common,
even though in the last twenty years there have
been signs of a loosening of the bonds. State,
society, legislation, still assume the existence of
the family, with its strong paternal authority
and maternal prestige, as the chief social unit.
Particularly in Latin countries, the family seems
more of a reality than the individual, and sacrifice
of the lattef to the supposed family interest is
taken for granted. The European family clearly
no longer harmonizes with the external demand

[i6s]

THIS AMERICAN WORLD

of the times, but it will die hard. At this
point whatever American influence has come in
through the moving picture and literature can
so far hardly be detected.

More effective are American ideas in education.
Academic and professional and trade preparation
Europe understands better than the United States ;
but what one might call the pragmatic or practical
tendency in American general education, and
aboveall,the co-educational system,are influencing
Europe and being somewhat hesitatingly imitated.

Sport and outdoor life are at least as much
English as American. But recently the American
way of looking at sport, the importance paid to
it, the deadly seriousness, the striving for cham-
pionships, regular training and the wide circle of
initiated enthusiasts capable of discussing all
phases with understanding, have been duplicated
in nearly all European countries.

To-day a champion finds nearly the same
worshipful crowd in Norway or Italy as in the
United States, and the foremost athletes can at
nearly any time crowd other items off the front
pages of the newspapers.

With this athletic interest has come greater

[i66]

EUROPE BECOMES AMERICANIZED

personal cleanliness, a renewed interest in other
than the erotic and digestive functions of the
body, saner clothing and in general a healthier
tendency, both physically and morally. Thanks
to sport and American moving pictures the Euro-
pean “ war generation ” now reaching maturity
seems handsomer than its predecessors, despite
its early privation and neglect.

Gradually, too, something of the American
adventure spirit — self reliance, belief in one’s
capacities, willingness to take a chance, to venture
rather than accept some shabby but safe berth —
is becoming apparent. The War, the auto and
airplane, American books and films have awakened
a new interest in purely physical adventure which
can be detected in nearly all European literature
as well as in the steady demand for more American
books and movies of the adventure type. An
author like Jack London finds admirers and
imitators all over Europe. Before the war a
European with the slightest knowledge of Ameri-
can literature was a rarity, and in the schools
Emerson and Longfellow were considered our
supreme* writers. Now Walt Whitman, Stephen
Crane, Jack London, can be had in nearly any

[167]

THIS AMERICAN WORLD

European language, and young authors are
systematically read and translated as soon as they
appear.

In Germany, Dreiser and Sinclair Lewis are
considered among the greatest living novelists,
with John Dos Passos and Ernest Hemingway
among the more promising. Even in England
good American books are properly rated. And
for the first time in our history all Europe studies
and defers to American thought.

15

The American contribution to world culture
is small, as the authors of Civilization in the
United States had no difficulty in proving. Com-
pared with Europe we are still, in spiritual mat-
ters, a sterile country. Personally I know of no
branch of thought in which we are supreme, unless
it be in economics. No American thinkers can
claim to the eminence of men like Freud and
Einstein. And even where we are collectively
imposing, as in science and invention, our origin-
ality can properly be questioned. For the most
part, we have taken foreign-born ideas and dis-
coveries and applied them with energy and talent.

[168]

EUROPE BECOMES AMERICANIZED

Which makes us practically efficient but does not
prove creative gifts.

Yet as the cultural springs of Europe become
less voluminous, our own small rills begin to
tinge the common river with a shade that is
truly ours. Quaint religious sects like New
Thought and Christian Science acquire a certain
European following. Even Mormonism still man-
ages to inspire a few of Europe’s superabundant
women with religious enthusiasm. Europe is dry
of religions while those we Americans produce
as by-products in our search for the belief that
shall be really ours, manage somehow to cross
the Atlantic.

As pure philosophy Pragmatism finds respect
and a few disciples abroad ; while the direct
way of viewing life of which Pragmatism is the
theoretical corollary is becoming more general,
though whether as an imitative or a parallel
phenomenon I am unable to say.

As theoretical sociologists the Europeans sur-
pass us. Practically our applications of sociolo-
gical principles, so successful when unvitiated
by wrong* psychological assumptions, interest but
do not really move European thinkers, sceptical

• [169]

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of optimism so ubiquitous and flamboyant as
ours.

The same scepticism meets our political thought.
A few of the new States have taken account of
the Federal Constitution in the formation of
their own systems, but despite James Bryce
even democratic states in Europe have found
our political theories too foreign for their
use.

And this applies to our unwritten political
ideas as well. Europe, except perhaps Great
Britain, esteems the State more highly than we do,
and does not like our democratic empiricism.
Especially in Great Britain, the American prefer-
ence for political to personal liberty and for social
efficiency to both, meets both misunderstanding
and aversion. America in European eyes suffers
two sorts of tyranny — ^that of finance and that
of an ignorant Main Street majority. Our readi-
ness to sacrifice the concrete individual to the
anonymous majority weal leaves Europeans cold
and unbelieving. For Europe has always been
and still is — even including Germany — a. society
of individuals.

All in all, despite numerous indices of con-
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EUROPE BECOMES AMERICANIZED

tact, the influence of America upon Europe’s
inner life, habits of thought, deeper beliefs,
fundamental aspirations and dreams, is small.

i6

Russia is a problem in itself. Russia is not
part of Europe in any but a geographical sense, and
therefore its reaction to Americanism does not
properly fall within this inquiry. But because
Russia is America’s rival for the soul of the
European masses, something ought properly to
be said.

American and Western Europe unite in con-
sidering Russia, regardless of its social organi-
zation, as a vast bed of barbarism strangely
shot through with fibres of almost supercivilized
refinement, with perhaps the only “ underived ”
art in the present world. Outside art — ^literature,
music, the drama, peasant craft — Russia is pre-
sumed to be a mixture, forbidding and fascinating,
of disgusting brutality and almost sublime human
love and self-abnegation. It is therefore not
without interest to learn that the leading Russian
communists look upon the United States as a
formidable giant body with the soul of a cruel

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child and the culture of the newspaper comic
supplement.

In 1924 the producer Meyerhold staged in
Moscow a satirical review called Give us Europe,
directed against the United States. Americans
were to be recognized in the somewhat cos-
mopolitan society represented, by the fact that
they put their feet on the table, or sat in rocking-
chairs ; they were accompanied in their entrance
or exit by a kind of Leitmotiv played on what was
then the only saxophone in Russia, which had
been specially borrowed by the producer for the
purpose.

Of what he calls American culture, of the
real or supposed American spirit, the cultmed
Russian communist desires as little as possible.
Yet these minds trained in Marxian determinism
imagine it is possible to take over American
industrial organization, technical devices, general
hustle and eventually prosperity, without any
taint of the cruel, greedy yet puerile capitalism
that inspired them ! In Russia such revolutionary
modern things as air lines and radio broadcasting
(chiefly to the otherwise poorly served provincial
newspapers) are almost more common than any-

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EUROPE BECOMES AMERICANIZED

where else, yet accompany the wooden plough and
a land-bound agrarian population of illiterates.

Prediction about results is more precarious in
Russia than elsewhere. It is a fact though that
sentimental American films are greatly appreciated
in Soviet Russia and that the Russian common
people, thanks in part to the Quaker Relief
workers, are friendly toward Americans and hos-
pitable to what they regard as Americanism.

17

At the present time, Americanism in a hundred
forms is present and powerful in Europe.
“ Europe,” says Paul Valery with some irony,
“ aspires visibly to be governed by an American
commission. . . . Being unable to get rid of our
history, we (Europeans) shall be relieved of it by
happy peoples who will impose their happiness
upon us.”

Many things tend that way. The old European
culture is decrepit. Its vitality seems to be
running away in a sort of diabetic self-destruction.
It is giving place to something entirely new which
Europe hardly seems to relish, and in which it is
largely surpassed by the United States. But

• [ 173 ]

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in the kst few years many leading Europeans
have become alarmed at the prospect of what they
call Americanization, and are calling upon the
Old Country to renew itself. Long before such
a hope can be realized or disappointed it will
have become clear that Americanization in Europe
is no violation, but only a needed retouching of
an ancient masterpiece.

[174]

V

THE LIMITS OF AMERI-
CANIZATION

I

A ROCK of industrial capitalism, a dynamo of
productive power, a siphon of liquid
wealth, all in the possession of active, some-
what brutal adolescents desirous and capable of
setting their seal upon the non-American world
— so the United States appear to Europe and the
far continents. In so far as the European indivi-
dual cherishes capitalism or admires wealth and
efficient energy he gives frank and often un-
stinted praise to American prowess in these fields.
Architects, engineers, bankers, business men,
doctors, newspaper men often sing the glories
of “ dollar land ” in Europe, many of them in
the face of current prejudice and legend. Pro-
fessor M. J. Bonn, the Berlin economist, in two

[175]

THIS AMERICAN WORLD

small but excellent volumes, America and Money
and Mind, has dug deeply into the American
psyche, usually rather impenetrable to Europe,
and is generous in his evaluation of what he has
found. But he does not suggest integral imitation
by Europe.

It is a fact that of the cultured Europeans who
have given serious consideration to Americanism,
practically none approve it to the extent of wish-
ing to further its growth in their countries.
Generally speaking, the more Europe’s cultural
leaders witness the inroads of the American system
into their world, the more pointed their hostility
and sweeping their derogation become.

Europe’s idealists find in America only a
severer case of the general illness from which
the entire globe, in their opinion, is suffering.
Dr. Hans Zbinden, the philosopher of Zurich,
after tracing the outstanding democratic figures
of American history from Franklin through
Jefferson to Walt Whitman and Lincoln, deplores
all modern democracy with its grasping hand and
levelling scythe, to him symbols of the tendencies
that have robbed contemporary life of its soul.

Paul Valery, the French Academician, allows
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LIMITS OF AMERICANIZATION

his irony to illumine contemporary darkness by
pronoimcing American dominion a proper punish-
ment for Europe, a continent favoured by Fate
with men and means to maintain itself indefinitely,
but too stupid to use them.

Count Hermann Keyserling, the sage of the
Darmstadt School of Wisdom, grudgingly admits
that it would be “no misfortune should sadly
Balkanized Europe be saved from its own worst
inclinations for a time by American superpower
But neither by temperament, birth nor property
loss through the Russian revolution is Count
Keyserling a partisan of contemporary currents.

To Oswald Spengler, one of the greatest
thinkers of the modern world, Americanism is
merely the last sad phase of the European culture
cycle which, having run most of its course, at
this point necessarily hardens into materialism,
money rule, democracy and the empery of soul-
less reason. The only charm of Americanism for
him is that it is inevitable.

These opinions, sombre though they be, are
among the more favourable pictures of the
United States as seen through European eyes.
The majority of the critics see Americanism

• [ 177 ] “

THIS AMERICAN WORLD

through their glasses, darkly. The more their
land seems to be offering dangerous hospitality
to “ Americans bringing gifts ”, the louder they
shout that the American “ wooden horse ” ought
to be about-faced and sent swimming back across
the ocean. Germany, for instance, has never
passed through the liberal period common to
much of Western Europe, and is therefore con-
sidered particularly liable to a postponed American
attack of it to-day. Sober Germans writing on
economics suddenly burst the bonds of pedantic
style to rise to lyric jeremiads against invading
barbarism from the States. Typical alike for his
general good sense and the depth of his aversion is
Hermann Levy. In a little book called National
Economy and Character, Levy notes with unim-
pugnable perspicacity how many objectionable
American characteristics have crept into the
Fatherland : the same advertising appealing to
the same superficial instincts ; public competitions
and beauty prize contests ; instead of good books,
cheap magazines filled with ever shorter and more
sensational stories and with superficial technical
articles flattering to the ignorance of the masses ;
long runs of a single theatrical success instead of

[ 178 ]

LIMITS OF AMERICANIZATION

the sober cultural repertory ; the star system ;
sensational newspapers with their racy appeal
and cheap illustrations ; pictorial newspapers
instead of description and solid thought. In
short Germany is already pretty well soaked with
Americanism . Amd despairingly the writer sounds
his denunciation :

“It is not necessary for the German or the
English people to become Americanized. It is
not necessary through deliberate propaganda to
further in Western Europe the ‘ culture of uni-
formity the schematism of the American way
of life, the uniformity of its wants and the
primitiveness of its cultural field of vision. It
is not necessary — aye, it is very questionable
whether such propaganda corresponds even to the
economic interests of Europe.”

This last doubt is shared by the English liberal
Ramsay Muir. After inspecting the United States
and noting his rather favourable impressions in a
book called America the Golden, he repudiates
the idea that industrial standardization could be
applied successfully to European conditions. In
his opinion, moreover, a great part of American

• [ 179 ]

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prosperity is due to the fact that “ the nation
as a whole regards wealth making as the highest
form of human activity. . , . With our (English)
traditions it is impossible that we should ever
accept this view ; and if it were possible, most
of us would be reluctant to accept it.” Not less
hostile and determined is Andre Siegfried, whose
recent America Comes of Age is already considered
a standard authority. While the United States
lead the world in all industries requiring stan-
dardized co-operation, Europe can hold its own
where the requirements are “ conscientious atten-
tion, interest in fine workmanship, artistic
initiative, the free outburst of personality ”. And
Siegfried even offers a detailed classification of
industrial products and finds consolation in the
fact that he is able to reduce American superiority
to a few rather broad types. Therefore he
concludes that although the United States seem
called upon to lead the Anglo-Saxon peoples,
it will be long before they can lead the white
race.

Not less concerned about the progress of
standardization in Europe is the brilliant French
novelist and political writer, Alfred Fabre-Luce.

[i8o]

LIMITS OF AMERICANIZATION

Basing his opinion of the United States on
Siegfried’s excellent work, Fabre-Luce declares
that the very “ quality ” of European labour
protects it against American business competition.
Europe needs new markets, but ought not to
acquire them by imitating the American system of
mass production and high wages, “ incompatible
with our psychology and our denser population
How could advertising expect to standardize the
consumption of a continent so variegated as
Europe ? How instal machinery ruthlessly with-
out producing monstrous unemployment ? Nor
is it proved that the American system is better
except for a continent with a relatively small
population and great natural riches. Is this
system not more dangerous in case of economic
crisis ? “ Europe, a continent of less rich pro-

ducers and less docile consumers, ought not to
allow itself the luxury of taking such a risk.”
Alfred Fabre-Luce is a man of culture and
tolerance, but his animosity against seeing France
and Europe Americanized emerges in every
sentence.

Where 'serious writers are so passionate, the
shrieks of the newspapers can be imagined.

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Certain English periodicals regularly incite the
Empire to act “ while there is yet time ” against
the upstart pride of new rich America. German
dailies publish long didactic articles wherein
“ America ” is the symbol for all that is mere-
tricious and foreign : one that I remember grew
particularly hoarse in mouthing the evils of the
American conception of industrial agriculture as
against the “ true continuance of the labours of
our fathers ”, namely, the big Junker estate with
the peasants bound to the owning family and
subject to control from above, “ The American
manner of thinking steals the German peasants’
soul.”

2

There is something charmingly comic about
the hysteria that often overtakes learned Europeans
when they think to find, beneath the handwriting
on the wall, the sinister letters, “ U. S. A.”. A
writer in a German periodical, who apparently
hails from some Scandinavian Athens, almost
forgets his Nordic refinement while lamenting
the “ irresistible primitiveness ” of American
moving pictures :

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“ Neither Germany with its feudal vestiges,
its inhibiting problems and conscience, nor France
with its aesthetic tradition, nor Italy with the
cardboard Fascism of its Caesar films can in the
long run seriously compete with the brutal
primitiveness of America.”

If this be true, a less passionate writer might
find ground for criticism rather in the brutality
of the European public that prefers these films
than in the commercial minds of the makers.
Given a little more emotion, and climatic as
well as social changes in the Old World will be
laid at the door of the New.

Meanwhile, since by definition the United
States possess no culture, American attempts to
acquire it in the normal ways are both inevitable
and ridiculous, like the caperings of Monsieur
Jourdain in Moli^re’s Bourgeois Gentilhomme.
When, for instance, a needy European desires to
dispose of an ohjet d'art, he can combine educa-
tional philanthropy with profit by seeking an
American customer. In any case the European
has the part of dignity and the American is in the
wrong. If the latter refuses to buy, he can be

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charged with sharing his nation’s crudity ; if
he makes the purchase, spectacled art critics will
attack him for “ robbing impoverished Europe of
its art treasures”.

It is much the same with education. Since
Americans are restricted by European definition
to unlearned farmers and Rotarians, serious
students and cultured people spoil the picture
and are pronounced un-American. When they
visit Europe their sojourn is sure to be sweetened
by the delighted squeals of native-born acquaint-
ances over their “ European ways ”, and the
intended compliment that they, or at least their
parents, must have been born in Europe. For
culture is a matter of slow development and
inheritance. It cannot be suddenly produced
in a land of Robots.

Europeans who like Americans apologize for us
to their countrymen. With the kindest motives.
Without a smile. Regis Michaud, in a book on
the modern American novel, goes to some length
to explain to his French readers that Babbitts
are the natural production of a democracy of a
hundred million souls that compels the ifidividual
to stifle his personality for the benefit of the

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LIMITS OF AMERICANIZATION

mass. This is true enough, but it ought not
to need excusing to a continent that is ceasing
to surpass America in the height of its cultural
production without bettering American achieve-
ments in other fields.

The European industrialist cannot but see that
the spread of Americanism means the loss of
his social and the diminution of his economic
superiority over his workers, who will end by
demanding an American standard of living. In
the same way, to the former ruling class Ameri-
canism forebodes the hopelessness of an attempt
to recover the lost political supremacy. To highly
cultured people, believing in the supremacy of
ideas, the profundity of past culture, the need
for a spiritual direction within a civilization and
the right of those who bear witness to these
truths to lead the others, Americanism is more
than a loss. It is a tragedy that only those who
have felt the beauty of the Old European tradition
can share. Salzburg, Lxibeck, Chartres, Lincoln,
Siena, lack the giant challenge of the New York
sky line — but how much more human is their
beauty ? * And how much more have they meant
to the human spirit — so far ?

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The European intellectuals do not believe that
Columbia and Chicago Universities will ever
take the place of Bologna and Oxford, the Sor-
bonne and Heidelberg, not because they distrust
novelty, but because they cannot love a civilization
based on material achievement, however proud.
Therefore they scoff at American crudeness and
turn the blunted sword of their failing influence
against invading Americanism.

For the contemporary European evaluates his
present in the rosy light of his long history ; the
American’s estimate of his country’s actual stand-
ing includes a large item of faith in its future.

3

Were we less self-confident and less bent on
proselytizing, Europe would be more tranquil.
But already the old continent is squirming under
our reforming zeal. There is something pecu-
liarly exasperating in the attitude of our superiority
in moral, social and sanitary matters adopted by
our tourists. “ Every American,” says Siegfried,
“ whether he is called Wilson, Bryan or Rockefeller,
is an evangelist who cannot let people 'alone and
who feels the constant duty of preaching to them.”
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LIMITS OF AMERICANIZATION

Europe is sceptical of reform, along with progress
and most of the other nineteenth century values.
And Europe is specially undesirous of being
reformed by Americans according to American
standards. The Meyerhold satire, Give Us
Europe, really voiced the opinion of the Old
Country on the New. And a writer in a news-
paper published (save the mark !) in Luxemburg,
a country a large fraction of whose inhabitants
has migrated to the United States, rises to the
acme of French profanity in his appeal to America
to leave Europe alone.

Judged by a hundred symptoms, Europe is
jealous with the bitter jealousy of the Old Man
of the Tribe towards a younger and already more
vigorous son.

4

It can be hardly expected that Europeans,
members of what is probably the most combative
race that ever lived, will abdicate without a
struggle. Even such a fatalist as Spengler con-
siders that during the period still granted them by
historic^ destiny, the Europeans can, if they will
conform to the necessities of the hour, still play

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the heroic r6le. In several pamphlets he has
urged the German youth to accept the require-
ments of the age and sees Germany’s proper path
to conservation of power in the further develop-
ment of the Prussian tradition, which he calls
“ socialism His ideal would seem to be fairly
well fulfilled by Fascist Italy — capitalism con-
trolled and directed nationalistically by strong
political leaders under the pretence of social
solidarity.

Many other groups, seeking the “ new leader-
ship ”, look up to Fascism and openly advocate
the dictatorship of the strong man. But on the
whole these partisans of the new brutality are
either dispossessed aristocrats itching for a restor-
ation of power, or embittered middle class victims
of European disorder, or capitalists with bundles
of axes to grind, or adventurers fond of heads to
break. There exist other people whose ambi-
tions run higher than the Fascist big stick.

So far as I know, their clearest speaker is
Count Hermann Keyserling. His message, pieced
together from many volumes, runs approximately
as follows :

No theoretical philosophy of history is needed

[i88]

LIMITS OF AMERICANIZATION

to demonstrate that European culture is decay-
ing. But this is not true of Europe only, but of
all cultures on earth. In the technical age no
pre-technical culture can last. Modern Europe
demonstrates the fact that a generation of movie
and radio enthusiasts, auto racers, flyers, and globe
trotters cannot remain true to old ideas and social
forms. Cultures decay when their indwelling
“ meaning ” has reached its fullest expression —
when they have nothing more to say. Therefore
it must be taken that Old Europe has spoken
its last word. Americanization of Europe is
possible. . . .

This danger is extraordinarily great, for
America’s unprecedented power is itself enticing.
American riches offer more solutions to problems
than European poverty. “ Liberal democracy
in the Anglo-Saxon sense is doubtless more
attractive than socialistic centralization.” Thus
the entire world, in so far as it adopted Western
civilization, may become Americanized, just as,
two thousand years ago, it took on the features
of Rome. Yet Anglo-Saxon civilization, like
Roman,* is* essentially without indwelling spirit,
and as to-day there exists no Greece — no country

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so obviously superior that it can civilize barbarians
— ^there arises the danger that white humanity
may be increasingly deprived of indwelling spirit.
The only thing which can prevent Americanism
from becoming universal is the presence of an
effective European minority that amidst encroach-
ing mental democracy refuses to be Americanized.

There is still hope for Europe. Americanism
means machinery and the ruling type is the
chauffeur, the mechanized savage. This type
lacks, however, the necessary spirit to create the
new culture. Therefore, if Europe can but bring
forth a new type, combining the alert mind,
boldness and easy technical mastery of machines
possessed by the present generation of chauffeur
rulers, with the spiritual intensity and aristocratic
distinction of its former leaders, Europe can again
lead the world. “ Europe’s task is once more to
breed the new decisive culture type. ... It can
mean more in the future than it has ever meant.”

5

More redoubtable if less philosophical oppon-
ents of Americanism are the adherents of inter-
national socialism. And by socialism I mean

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the doctrine that the State should in some manner
guarantee economic equality, probably by assum-
ing ownership of the means of production, on the
ground that without economic equality, political
equality is not merely useless but illusory. Most
socialists are convinced that the creation of as
complete equality as possible is the immediately
necessary, as well as the highest, human aim.

Though the partisans of this doctrine are mostly
to be found in Europe and their obvious opponents
are the propertied interests in their own countries,
a great many direct their sharpest enmity against
the United States, now the chief protagonist of
the money power they are fighting. Their criti-
cism of the United States is of two kinds : dis-
like of what America is, and scorn of America’s
hypocrisy in pretending to be what it is not.

The United States, in their judgment, are, of
all civilized lands, the most anti-socialistic. They
are the home of the most aggressive and powerful
financial interests on earth, and furthermore the
most capable. They harbour the largest and
probably the most predatory commercial combines
and trusts, *and in their name oppose all inter-
national and socialistic tendencies of labour with

• [ m ]

THIS AMERICAN WORLD

ruthless opposition and acrimony. In short, they
are the centre of world capitalism and must be
socialized before any truly international socialism
can prevail.

The Federal and most of the minor American
governments, the army and navy, justice and
press, are so many instruments of American
capitalism. Labour, if self-conscious, has before
the bar of American public opinion no chance of
obtaining fair treatment. Industrial capitalism,
concentrating money and power, is necessarily in
the hands of a comparatively few persons, the
possessing class, which, exactly as in Europe, but
on a much larger and more barbarous scale,
defends its holdings through conscious and
methodical oppression of the non-propertied
labouring class. America is therefore a class
society.

What makes American society at the same time
more despicable and more formidable than Euro-
pean society is its hypocritical claim to be some-
thing different. America prances and masquer-
ades as the “ land of the free ”, erects a French
statue of Liberty in its chief harbour, and grants
those who oppose its real tyranny no liberty at

[192]

LIMITS OF AMERICANIZATION

all. It deports or refuses entrance to radically
minded foreigners, it passively sanctions the
bvuming of black, and the mishandling of yellow
people. It demands from its masses the sacrifice
of all forms of personal freedom considered
disadvantageous to the cause of the industrial
Moloch the capitalists worship ; it ruthlessly
violates its own statutes, its own conventions,
its most sacred promises, whenever self-interest
advises. Itself organized, capitalism, where it
can, refuses labour the same right. Through
court injunctions and police brutality and chicane
it nullifies the laws it cannot immediately repeal
or circumvent. Therefore, since the United
States as the domain of a ruthless class posing in
idealistic trappings have proved false to their
ideals, the United States are the enemy of all
humane people interested in realizing the great
dream of freedom and equality for which the
American forefathers claimed to have bled.

Moreover, the United States are nationalistic ;
both because aggressive nationalism must be the
outcome of their financial and industrial im-
perialism* and because the population is largely
uncultured, unfeeling and pugnacious, capable

• [ 193 ] N

THIS AMERICAN WORLD

of being roused to the wildest and most savage
fanaticism when the ruling few find it convenient
to loosen the press hounds and the jackals of the
pulpit and the podium. A new war is the greatest
misfortune that could overtake mankind, and
this new war will be, must be, provoked by the
American capitalists for the same reason that
they plundered Mexico and Cuba and unleashed
the marines against the helpless states of the
Caribbean.

Admitted that Americanism is the most power-
ful economic tool ever created and the American
conception of regenerating material conditions of
life through general “ engineering ” is great.
But before this tool and this conception can be
taken over by a really civilized society, they must
pass into the philanthropic hands of a labour
— ^that is, of a truly democratic — government.

This government can to-day be found only
in Russia. While on the external side — in all
that the Germans call Zivilization in contra-
distinction to inner Kultur — ^America is incal-
culably more advanced, the Soviet government,
despite its brutality and Oriental indifference to
terrifying measures, honestly incorporates the

[194]

LIMITS OF AMERICANIZATION

will to realize a true industrial and agricultural
democracy, to escape war for ever and bring about
human brotherhood. The real classless state
must be socialist. Not the United States but
Russia will lead mankind out of the dungeons of
prejudice and unlock the handcuffs of oppression.

So rims the socialist thesis. It is one-sided
and highly coloured. The European Marxian’s
idea of the United States is in my opinion about
as exact as Babbitt’s notion of Soviet Russia.
That international socialism is a practical ideal
may well be doubted : who can assure us that
a completely communistic State — should one ever
exist — ^would be necessarily pacific or interna-
tionally minded ? But that it is a great dream
cannot be questioned.

6

Less openly but none the less deeply opposed
to Americanism are the majority of European
statesmen, particularly the new crop of dictators
and regents who have besooted Southern and
Eastern Europe with terrorism. In the insidious
ways froih over the water they see a menace to
their own permanence, a danger to their power

• [ 195 ]

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and a threat directed against the specific charac-
teristics and institutions (Empire, Fascism, Mon-
archy) on which they have risked their private
futures. Therefore as often as they extend the
palm for American money, they shiver at the
probability of an American financial and even
political hegemony in the none too distant future,
fatal to their own imperial or nationalistic or
commercial ambitions.

Perhaps this state of things is most obvious
in Italy. The present Italian rulers dislike all
that America represents except abundant money.
They know that the lira was saved by dollar
loans and the Italian industries rescued from
certain defeat at the hands of the German by
Wall Street kindness. They understand the con-
crete necessity of keeping America’s good will.
The American money lords allowed Sacco and
Vanzetti to be legally murdered, but they have
the power and must be propitiated. Italy worries
how best to propitiate the American signori. But
it likes them no better than do the dictators of
Hungary and Spain, French politicians and
British conservatives. And the basis df this dis-
like is jealousy of the type described.

[196]

LIMITS OF AMERICANIZATION

Thanks to this widespread jealousy and dislike,
all Europe vacillates between attempts at propi-
tiating America and thoughts about a European
customs union or even the formation of some
larger political block of hitherto rival states.
Since American extension and population give
the United States an almost insuperable advan-
tage in most forms of international competition,
Europe ought to seek equal extension and numer-
ical strength by uniting. A few pessimists even
allege that Europe must unite or perish.

The results of such European combination
coul3 be so considerable that Ramsay Muir feels
it necessary to sound a warning :

“ Already the European people are beginning
to take alarm at the prospect of an economic
domination by America and to organize to resist it.
If it continues the result may be an economic war
of continents ; economic ‘ continentalism ’ might be
yet more disastrous than economic ‘ nationalism

In opposing the United States, the European
rulers would consider their action a laudable
attempt to* rescue delicate Europa from the
designs of the American Cyclops.

• [ 197 ]

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Should a united Europe wage war on the
United States it might well win. There was a
moment in antiquity when a union of Greek
States, not to speak of victorious Macedon,
could have wiped the Roman village from the
seven hills and wasted the mountains of Latium.
But the moment is probably past, even were the
European statesmen to achieve the incredible
and unite against North America. In European
eyes aggression is far more likely to come from
the other side. Americans are a believing lot :
should their business interests come to need a
subservient Europe for the continuance of “'nor-
mal prosperity ”, they might conceivably rouse the
people’s fanaticism and reforming zeal to the
point of an attempt to Americanize Europe by
might. In which case, instead of succumbing
piecemeal, Europe might unite as a continent to
oppose the attacking continent.

This hypothesis is not too fantastic. Bertrand
Russell believes that the American people are
almost bound to attempt to dominate the world,
and assumes that such an attempt may well take
military shape. In the Prospects of 'Industrial
Civilization he writes :

[198]

LIMITS OF AMERICANIZATION

“ In spite of an overwhelming influx of for-
eigners of all sorts ... it has been found pos-
sible to produce a degree of national consciousness
that enabled America to put forth a first-class
effort in the war, and it is enabling her now to
make a bid for world empire with more hope
for success than attended the previous efforts of
Spain or France or Germany.”

World empire ? It rings fearsome to most of
us. Nothing is further from our intentions.
But hear the English philosopher further :

“ America may not, as yet, consciously desire
such a position, but no nation with sufficient
resources can long resist the attempt. And the
resources of America are more adequate than
those of any previous aspirant to universal hege-
mony. First of all, America is self-supporting
in all the necessaries of peace and war ; both
industry and agriculture could be preserved in
almost complete efficiency without commerce with
any other continent. Secondly, America has
the largest white population of any state except
Russia, ahdr its population is superlatively skilled,
energetic and physically courageous. Thirdly,

• [ 199 ]

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Canada would have to side with America in any
serious war, if only for reasons of self-preserva-
tion ; and Mexico would be unable to refuse
access to its mineral resources. Therefore the
whole of North America must be coimted as
belonging to the United States in considering the
possibilities of a world war. Fourthly, America
could, after the outbreak of the war, build a
sufficiently powerful navy to defeat any possible
hostile naval combination. Fifthly, all Europe is
in America’s debt and we in England are depen-
dent upon America for our very existence, owing
to our need of raw cotton and Canadian wheat.
Lastly, the Americans surpass even the British
in sagacity, apparent moderation and the skilful
use of hypocrisy by which even themselves are
deceived. Against such a combination of re-
sources no existing state could hope to prove
victorious.”

Russell obviously leaves the possibility of a
united Europe out of the picture. Certainly the
odds are greatly against it. A vast European
coalition could only be formed and' galvanized
under pressure of atrocious fear. Even then

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LIMITS OF AMERICANIZATION

anything like intelligent diplomacy on the part
of the Americans ought to be able to prepare the
way for national triumph by buying out of the
European block a major ally or two.

7

Such conjecture is more interesting than cogent.
Though the European leaders were able to overcome
their mutual antipathies and, after over-running
the United States, dictate terms to beaten Americans
at Denver, Americanism of a kind would still
conquer Europe. Perhaps such a European vic-
tory would even foster it, for it seems a rule of
life that victors and vanquished exchange certain
characteristics. But that is not important.
Europe will continue to develop what its leaders
call Americanism simply because democratic
masses, technique, materialistic ambitions, are
essentially offsprings of the European mind.
Americanism would sweep over Europe were the
American continent annihilated, or even had
there never been any America.

Yet because Europe is a mosaic of vastly
different* peoples at widely divergent points in
their development, the amount and form of
• [ 201 ]

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Americanism — ^that is, the degree of adaptability
to the new demo-industrial conditions — ^will vary
from country to country.

To a Frenchman or an Italian, even the shrewd-
est, the English and Scotch already seem half
Americanized. Yet, Great Britain, in my opinion,
will not be first or most completely transformed.
The peoples who dominated the world’s industrial
and financial life in the nineteenth century feel
most acutely the tribal jealousy towards upstart
America, and while unwilling to abdicate, they
cannot achieve the necessary humility to sacrifice
their ancient pride and somewhat outworn know-
ledge. Sturdy British manufacturers generally
still abhor mass production and will not scrap
old machinery and methods . But they are shrewd ,
and once the great truth dawns that the Ameri-
cans have really carried out a second industrial
revolution as important as the first, the British
will gradually fall into line, and perhaps in
co-operation with the Americans, accept “ manifest
destiny ”. If they do so, they can prolong their
period of empire by at least a century.

Of all the European nations, the Germans
seem likely to go furthest along the American

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LIMITS OF AMERICANIZATION

path. Culturally younger, fond of business, tech-
nically imaginative, intellectual, disciplined, with
small material demands, they have already made
the most serious study of American methods and
the sincerest efforts to take over what they found
good. Moreover, in contrast to the English, the
German character is an5rthing but stiff — the soul
stuff is essentially amorphous and receptive, easily
adaptable and- malleable to leadership. Should
the industrial plutocracy now dominant become
convinced that Americanism is worth the sacrifice
of their ancient feudal dignity and guild spirit,
they could easily bring up their people in the
way they desire. Large American investments in
Germany would lighten the task.

The Dutch, despite their stiffness, have a nose
for the main chance unequalled in the world.
Located, geographically and mentally, between
Britain and Germany, free from the waste of
continental political rivalry, democratic, tenacious
and intelligent, they seem admirably fitted to
play a mediatory role between the continents.
And though Scandinavia and Switzerland have
already liardened into smug perfection, there
seems little obstacle to the laying of a

• [ 203 ]

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mantle of Americanism across their contented
bodies.

Recalcitrant to mass phenomena, the Latins
offer poor soil to transplanted American life.
The obstacle is individualism. Ferocious in
Spain, anarchical in Italy, revolutionary in France,
this individualism seerhs almost insuperable.
Peoples with a keen sense for the sharper satis-
faction of civilized living, conscious of past
supremacy and possessing acute critical insight,
must abhor standardization and mass anonymity.
Quick to unite and fuse, they as readily fall
asunder. Unconquerable in the occupations where
taste and individual capacity must supplement
industry, they become listless or rebellious under
monotony. Modern industrial life is, for the
under dogs, nothing if not monotonous. Ameri-
canization in Latin countries would appear to
demand an almost complete renewal of the
national genius. Such a phenomenon is rare.

More problematic are Poland and the Balkans.
While the former boasts a past period of high
civilization, the masses are surprisingly fresh.
In both regions the long suppressed national
consciousness is now blazing with essentially

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LIMITS OF AMERICANIZATION

youthful intensity. Vitality and the belief in
progress, both on the wane in Western Europe,
are undiminished. Every Pole, Serb or Hun-
garian has faith in his own and his country’s
destiny. The absence of tradition makes them
superior in a Europe whose traditions have be-
come burdensome. It is no coincidence that
Roumanian and Hungarian writers are so easily
adapting themselves to world taste. In the period
of technical and financial combinations now
prevalent, there is a large place for those East
European qualities former ages would have
accounted defects. Therefore in many ways the
future of these countries seems easier and more
promising than that of the more civilized western
ones. Americanism in Eastern Europe ought
not to encounter very serious difficulties.

8

Americanism as understood by Europe is
therefore not only probable but practically inevit-
able. But not Europe alone is to be asked to
submit to it. Unless the signs are false or I read
them badl^, the entire civilized world is destined
to be thus Americanized. And in this generaliza-

. [ 205 ]

THIS AMERICAN WORLD

tion I include not only South America and Asia
but, should the process be sufficiently prolonged,
Arab and black Africa as well.

For there nowhere exists a living, non- American
culture capable of offering any serious resistance
to the new forces. Africa through its backward-
ness and insupportable climate, Asia through its
profoundly anchored traditions and monstrous
inertia, have resisted European civilization in all
but political fields with considerable success.
But in the guise of industrial technique and
democracy, under the name of Americanism, this
civilization will break down past barriers and, so
far as consciousness of oppression rouses the
Asiatic and African peoples, be borrowed by them
as the best arm to wield against their oppressors.

Furthermore, the world of wireless telephony
and broadcasting, picture transmission and air-
planes, is, under present conditions, too small for
more than one civilization to exist at once. There
may be nooks and impervious angles where
penetration will be slow — “ nature still has secret
breeding places ” — but distance and geographical
mystery have been obliterated. National isola-
tion, continental isolation, is a peevish child’s

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LIMITS OF AMERICANIZATION

dream. The unexplored has been restricted to
the inter-planetary spaces and to the soul of man,
and he who loathes or shrinks from the mechanical
mass-life here called Americanism must take
refuge in one of these so far inaccessible haunts
or advocate general destruction. It is of course
conceivable that Americanism will in the long run
alienate so much that is ineradicable in human
nature that the masses of men will arise and
destroy it, and with it all civilization whatsoever.
It is not immediately likely.

For Americanism is not incompatible with
socialism of any type that could come to prevail
in countries at present civilized, A Britain, a
France, or a Germany that had “ gone com-
munist ” would none the less continue to follow
American industrial methods and cultivate and
develop American amusements.

It is only questionable whether without the
spur of material benefits, the organizing and
externally progressive standards of such a society
would not soon stagnate. Meanwhile, barring a
world catastrophe, it would be inevitably Ameri-
canized. • •

It is for this reason that so many of the European
, [ 207 ]

THIS AMERICAN WORLD

leaders have decided to cease chewing the cud of
past culture and are trying to gulp down the new
standards. The European and Asiatic masses
are awaiting the expected material benefits open
mouthed. But for refined representatives of a
massive and imposing tradition, it is a bitter
drink. Enthusiasm for quantity is so essentially
childish that to share it requires a deliberate
puerilizing of the adult mind. And though the
age is not without its adequate problems and
rewards, the new type of successful leader is
often so nauseous to the developed character that
entire renunciation seems preferable. Therefore
many spirits are already taking refuge in that
Gibraltar of consolation, the Roman Catholic
Church, and more will do so. But the moment
of the faltering spirit that would mark that
Church’s triumph, is still immensely remote.

9

Yet the Europeans who feel themselves hostile
to industrialized democratic civilization, or who
draw back from an economic struggle between
the nations, possibly leading to wars of a more
atrocious kind than hitherto practised, can per-

[208]

LIMITS OF AMERICANIZATION

haps find intellectual comfort in the thought that
what Europe calls Americanism is the body and
not the soul of American life. This soul, the
result of several hundred years’ comparative
isolation and a mixing of all the European peoples
with a broad strand of Negro blood and instincts,
already possesses an intrinsic personality that
distinguishes it from the soul of Europe. No
great people ever denies its own soul. To be
reborn as a twin brother of the United States,
Europe would have to pass through a purgatorial
process that is unthinkable. Even as an American
colony Europe would still be in spirit un-American.
For of the essential American ideas Europe as a
whole possesses no single one.

These qualities are, in my opinion, English
Liberty, or the spirit of free co-operation and
compromise ; Right Will, or the belief that man
can be moulded to any conceivable pattern and
desire by proper thought and effort ; and Natural
Equality — the feeling that despite external varia-
tion human beings are in some mysterious way
equal in possessing the unquenchable spark that
makes them men.

English liberty has never existed on the Euro-
» [ 209 ] o

THIS AMERICAN WORLD

pean continent and the development of the class
system and the social split into conservative and
labour interests are killing it in Great Britain.
Socialism and English Liberty are incompatible,
and the continent tends strongly towards socialism
or dictatorship — ^alike in their negation of free
compromise. Without English Liberty there can
be no restraint to ruthless political and economic
fanaticism ; the American system cannot support
internecine fanaticism.

Right Will, that strange faith in human ability
to achieve its every imagined success — of which
the vital belief in human progress is but one
important phase — exists to some extent in Eastern
Europe, but is entirely absent from the over-
populated, history-ridden countries along the
Atlantic.

Natural Equality is the credo of the European
socialist, but the majority of non-socialist Euro-
peans both scoff at it and fear it. It runs counter
to tradition and human experience and bluntly
stated as a fact, provokes the derision of the
adult mind. To understand it mystically, as the
American understands it, there must* hte added
some such words as “ before God ”. These

[ 210 ]

LIMITS OF AMERICANIZATION

words European rationalism has progressed too
far to accept, and only a spiritual renewal could
subdue mature rationalism. The Old Coimtry
moreover has far too large a bump of accmnulated
experience ever to believe that men are born
“ neutral protoplasm ” whose shaping is a matter
of environment and chance. With the conse-
quence that Natural Equality, through a European
conception, could only become authoritative in
Europe through the triumph of socialism.

10

Centuries ago the spirit of economic adventure
drove thousands of bold Europeans westward
across “ no man’s water ” in the search for for-
tune and novel experience. “ It was in the
Rockies and beyond that the dreams of Walter
Raleigh and John Smith’s companions of the
seventeenth century were finally realized.” But
in the United States this spirit did not die with
the winning of the west, but remained in the
descendants of the first daring Europeans and
those who came into the land they civilized. That
it could ]feo*remain was due to the stimulant of
riches of a thousand sorts, above, upon and in the

' [211]

THIS AMERICAN WORLD

earth, all waiting to be realized. American life
has tended to allow free scope to this spirit, so
greatly fertile in material and even intellectual
results. Therefore the adventure of getting rich
has had for America almost the formative value
of an idea, and though it will wane with exhaustion
of hidden wealth, while it lasts it must seem a
taunt to Europe. For of all social conceptions
it is the one the European masses seek most
earnestly to stamp out. Europe has no such
intoxicating period of rapid enrichment behind
it, but a class struggle. Socialism and Economic
Adventure are enemies. Now adherence to social-
ism can mean the lofty desire of suppressing
economic struggle in order to release energy for
activity in other, nobler fields. Or it can mean
the high ethical renunciation of individual well-
being except as it can be diffused among the
masses — ^the refusal to outstrip one’s fellows in
the benefits of the world. But usixally it means
neither of these, but rather a somewhat weary
liking for gregarious warmth sharpened by a
kind of jealousy. A nation of saints might well
sacrifice material adventure to human* brother-
hood, a people of geniuses scorn material benefits
[ 212 ]

LIMITS OF AMERICANIZATION

for enhanced powers of creation in aesthetic or
intellectual spheres. A few high-minded indivi-
duals might agree that mass achievement more
than compensates for individual penury. But the
peoples of Europe are neither saints nor geniuses
and their high-mindedness is, to say the least,
sporadic. Therefore it is a fair inference that the
European socialists, who seem likely to increase,
will so successfully oppose the Spirit of Economic
Adventure as to save their peoples from it.

The United States are no more saintly or high-
minded or gifted than Europe ; they are simply
different.

II

Essentially, therefore, Europe will not be
Americanized. Externally, Americanization fol-
lows in the line of Europe’s normal development
and can hardly be staved off. This outward
Americanism is indeed the form in which Euro-
American civilization will conquer the earth.
And though the period be “ American ”, the epoch
is still “ European ”. The United States may
play th^dbminant role, but the position of cul-
tured Greece even in Roman antiquity was any-

. [213]

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thing but contemptible. Except to people bom
out of their time, the present and future of Europe
need not be dark. Industrial civilization is both
levelling and monotonous, but the prospects of an
age of scientific business and social experiment
are sufficiently fascinating to engage most curious
minds. It is possible that so gifted a continent
as Europe will, once it accepts the inevitable,
find ways of compensating for American natural
advantages by numbers and sheer genius. A
politically or economically united Europe could
set a fast pace for the United States and play a
giant’s part in spreading the new technique to
Asia and Africa, or even combine with North
America in defence against them. The immediate
future holds extraordinary problems. The des-
tiny of South America in the coming centuries is
an5^hing but clear. A vast Latin-American re-
vival could upset the finest calculations . Australia
may become the stronghold of the English-speak-
ing peoples . Even more probable would seem the
emergence of something novel from Russia, such
as the creation of a vast Eurasian empire which,
temporarily Americanized on the suri'ace, might
melt the Asiatic and the Slavic races together in

[214]

LIMITS OF AMERICANIZATION

some new and finer race. A communistic block
stretching from Bristol to Vladivostock would
wear “ American ” attire, but might prove fatal
to the United States.

Yet the ties that bind Western Europe to
North America are on both sides deeper than their
manner of speaking might allow one to suppose.
Now and for a long time to come those two
regions are integral parts of a single civilization.

[215]

VI

THE FUTURE OF THE UNITED
STATES

“ For history is long, hngy long. Shift and turn the com-
binations of the statements as we may, the problem of the future
of America is in certain respects as dark as it is vast”

Walt Whitman.

I

A fter a period of approximately 174 years
(1609-1783) as a European colony, the
United States of America have, in a considerably
shorter period of independence, become the
strongest and richest nation on the globe.

Foreign countries were somewhat abruptly
made aware of this fact during the War when the
trans-oceanic State suddenly leaped into the Euro-
pean lists and flung down, instead of a glove, a
sermon, a Lewis gun and a sack of double-eagles.
Once the War was over and settled to their satis-

[216]

FUTURE OF THE UNITED STATES

faction, the Allies invited the newcomer, respect-
fully but not without guile, to sit down in the inner
council of the League of Nations and help them
run the world. They were surprised and a little
alarmed when he refused, and became publicly
indignant when the American leaders, aware of
how matters stood, began to proclaim their coun-
try’s right to “ assist mankind ” in the ways it
thought fit, and in these ways alone. Since then
preponderant American power and prestige have
become a commonplace. Historians and philo-
sophers of reputation have mentally issued a new
edition of “ Who’s Who among the Nations ” and
certain of them have announced that the future of
mankind depends upon the action of America
during the next half century.

Yet the opening of the American period in
history happens to coincide with what one may
call a spiritual crisis among the intellectual leaders
of the Euro-American race, and of other races as
well. For the present world appears to many
to be progressively losing its soul. “ Protestant
revival in America, economic and psychological
simplificition in India (Ghandi), decadence and
romanticism. Fascism and Neo-Catholicism in
. [217]

THIS AMERICAN WORLD

Europe — ^in principle all the same psychological
symptoms of the lack of any way out, the absence
of any practical and positive indications of the
direction to be followed.” For a progressive
decrease in spirit seems to have kept pace with
gigantic material development.

While to the rulers and the majority adherents
in the United States their country’s donning of the
toga virilis seems a happy justification of the
official optimism and a witness of the national
wisdom, a minority of no great numerical strength
but strong in mastery of the written and spoken
word proclaims American predominance to be
unmeaning or disastrous, since America, new as
it is, has already gone wrong.

Dissent is no new thing in the United States.
From the very beginning there have always been
minor prophets prophesying doom if this or that
favourite hobby be not backed by the majority.
But the presence of a vociferous if heterogeneous
group, including popular writers and prosperous
citizens, who view their country with the eyes
of native malcontents and foreign critics, brings
to light the disturbing fact that American life does
not seem to be satisfying a large number of

[218]

FUTURE OF THE UNITED STATES

inhabitants. People with leisure find America
dull ; democrats complain of plutocracy ; discon-
tented workers charge it with injustice ; unsuc-
cessful burghers' of the older stocks denounce it
as increasingly foreign and Jewish ; old-fashioned
Puritans name it godless ; cynics label it “ boob-
and-boss ” rule ; artists with unsatisfied hopes
pronounce it unproductive ; intellectuals sneer at
it as uncivilized ; philosophers with ideals find it
soulless. One or two historians of imagination
sum up all the other complaints by proclaiming
it Roman. And thereby, at the very moment of
their glory, orthodox Americans are challenged
to view their failures and achievements objectively,
in terms of human history. Clearly the period
of perfect confidence in world progress and
America’s heaven-appointed station at its head,
is ending.

2

Nearly all observers make much of the difference
between the United States and Europe. In the
first years of the nineteenth century, Perrin du
Lac, a Freflch traveller, was greatly impressed by
the way the Americans of that day did everything

. [219]

THIS AMERICAN WORLD

differently from Europeans. In my own opinion,
there exist in the American soul certain basic
qualities which can probably never be communi-
cated to other peoples. A witty Austrian, Arthur
Rundt, writer and artist at the same time, has
published a delightful book to demonstrate that
“ America is different ”. A wise German, Leo-
pold Ziegler, credits our country with an Atlantic
or European face, and a Pacific or truly American
one. Andr6 Siegfried speaks of our “ completely
original society ”. “a system independent of
Europe ”. Which may be narrowly true. Yet
Europe is anything but independent of the United
States. The waves of power are simply running
the other way.

In the broader frame of history, America and
Europe are parts of the same system. If we take,
not the country or the continent, but the civiliza-
tion as the historical unit, it is clear that until
recently, the centre would have been Europe, even
had America been settled centuries earlier. At
present European civilization has to be rebaptized
Euro-American simply because at this period the
qualities America possesses supremely, further
the general development more successfully than

[ 220 ]

FUTURE OF THE UNITED STATES

those of the mother countries. The differences
between the two continents are largely a matter
of chronology.

For centuries to come Europe and the United
States will continue to be parts of a single
system whose essential unity and nature will be
unmodified by the shift in the centre of
gravity.

In the light of this fact, it is impossible to
escape a comparison ; the external Americanizing
of Eiwope is historically no more and no less
than the Romanizing of the Mediterranean world
some zooo years ago. Greece never became
Roman : Europe will not be inwardly Ameri-
canized. But as Rome embodied the develop-
ment of the classical ideal to completion and
decline, so the United States are Euro-American
civilization in its latest phase.

3

Evidence to support the thesis is plentiful.
The more one investigates, the further the resem-
blance goes. At present I have reached the con-
clusion fhat nearly all the qualities, limitations,
tendencies and features of contemporary America
• [ 221 ]

THIS AMERICAN WORLD

were present in Roman Italy sometime in the
second century b,c.

With us, as in Rome, business is the essence of
politics and life is organized for promoting the
commonwealth, the res publica, as the business
leaders conceive it. Comfort and hygiene are
the highest ideals. It is sometimes forgotten
that until fairly recently no communications in
the world were so good or so rapid as they had
been under Roman rule. Roman houses and
tenements were often intramurally heated, a
luxury we have not yet adopted. Roman hygiene
in keeping the Campagna healthful and draining
the Pontine marshes, Roman hydraulics in the
aqueducts, Roman architecture in the vast baths
and palaces, coliseums and bridges, arouse wonder
from age to age. Roman roads have outlasted
all highways built since their day.

The attitude of the Roman traveller in Greece
must have been similar to the indulgent superiority
of the American tourist in Europe ; both peoples
distrusted foreigners in spite of considerable
familiarity with them. Neither had any respect
for systematic philosophy, or intellectilalis, or any
but the national past ; both preferred to work

f 222 1

FUTURE OF THE UNITED STATES

out results in hard practice and judge according
to good sense and personal experience. Rome
anticipated the Anglo-American tendency toward
successful empiricism in politics and conquered
peoples to “ civilize ” them.

In Rome after Tiberius Gracchus there was
considerable advance toward democracy, and in
both countries the entire population received the
franchise, with similar results. With this demo-
cracy, money power and imperialism went hand
in hand. Contemporary Americans often forget
that their early statesmen were vividly conscious
of the “ vast empire ” afforded by the American
continent. As early as i860 William H. Seward
was dreaming of a further American empire in
Asia, and a modern empire is actually being
realized, under commercial and military pressure,
around the Caribbean.

In Rome the price of empire was several tem-
porary and a finally permanent dictatorship, with
the men of violence assisted by the men of money.
The Roman peace at home and abroad meant the
sacrifice of many values the masses of Americans
still prized t6-day. This phase seems to have
been reached in certain European countries and

. [ 223 ]

THIS AMERICAN WORLD

there are many signs that America may be moving
in the same direction. Perhaps it was the thought
of such a change that led an English couple to
dedicate a volume “ to the dying race of real
Americans

With the arm of modern banking and industrial
machinery in their hands, our own aspirants to
dictatorial powers seek financial rather than
armed conquest ; the result is nearly the same.
Under pluto-democracy there was in Rome a
marked tendency toward standardization, though
the absence of machine production made the fact
less salient. Significantly enough, Charles and
Mary Beard justify American standardization on
the ground that “ all previous societies have been
standardized at some level of poverty or wealth ”.

Equally Roman is our tendency to level down
by denying the requisites of existence to most of
the things the masses do not consider important.
In Euro-American society democracy has been
concomitant with a fearful loss in the richness of
aesthetic and intellectual life. Though it has not
yet justified the fears of one of the eighteenth-
century founders of the United States that it
would mean the sweeping away of “ reason, com-

[224]

FUTURE OF THE UNITED STATES

mon sense, talents and virtue ”, democracy has
accepted low standards in right living and taste.
The average may be higher than in pre-democratic
Europe, but the finer things are dwarfed. The
democratic Beards express the belief that “America
of the machine age offered material substance for
the life of the mind more varied and more lucra-
tive, both relatively and absolutely, than any
nation that has flourished since the beginnings of
civilization in the Nile Valley ”. Which may be
exact if one puts the accent on the words
“ material ” and “ lucrative ”. Doubtless Rome
offefed more “ material substance ” to the intel-
lect than Greece, yet Rome produced no original
thinker of worth after Lucretius. Nor does the
abundance of this “ material substance ” change
the fact that actually in America and increasingly
in Europe, the mental life of thousands who
ought to be the source and guardian of culture is
infinitely poorer, more puerile, more materialistic
and less productive than the apparent possibilities
of the age would justify or than many past
nations have produced from less.

To be^ifre, there are symptoms in our society
of a break away from inner uniformity and some

. [ 225 ] I"

THIS AMERICAN WORLD

foreign visitors even think that variation in
America is beginning at the moment that it is
declining in Europe. Even if this be true — and I
doubt it — individual variation is not the same as
mental productivity, although the former is usually
the condition of the latter. Florence did not wait
for great wealth to produce geniuses. Con-
temporary America is hardly congenial to cul-
tured men save as a spectacle and a hope. A
civilization is growing there, but not organically
— not from the ground up, as Whitman and
Thoreau had hoped, but from above down. It
is our rich men who, having exhausted the thrills
of the search for money and power, are turning
to fields of philosophy and art. There is no
doubt but that in this sense our millionaires are
doing us good.

The position of women in the United States
cannot but attract the attention of all students of
Roman history. At a certain point old Roman
society began to show symptoms of a rupture with
traditions very similar to the one now accom-
plished in America. The women of Greece
never achieved “ emancipation ”. Bui the posi-
tion of the Roman matron changed in a way

[ 226 ]

FUTURE OF THE UNITED STATES

that has impressed historians, some of whom
were even foolish enough to attribute Rome’s
later downfall to it. This emancipation, this
emergence of women from the home and their
participation in the public life not only of pleasure
but of politics and business, was in my opinion
more the work of rationalism in freeing the society
from a broken tradition than the sign of any real
decay of virtue or common sense. But it ought
to interest all who see in the American equality
of the sexes a sure sign that mankind has finally
emerged from age-long darkness into dazzling
sunshine, to realize that, on a smaller scale, it
occurred before. The downfall of the Roman
Empire was none the less sure.

Nearly all foreigners and a few Americans
believe that in many matters the United
States are now largely controlled by feminine
influence.

As the Beards put it :

“ Having the means to buy and to command,
women became powerful arbiters in all matters of
taste, morals and thinking. In short they called
the tunes to which captains of industry, men of

[ 227 ]

THIS AMERICAN WORLD

letters, educators and artists now practically
danced.”

The cynic cannot but be reminded of Cato’s
complaint : “ All men rule over women, we
Romans rule over all men, and our wives rule
over us.”

In aggressive societies, like the Roman and
the American, the men are immersed in business
or politics or sport and tend to leave to women
whole fields, such as art, religion, fashion and
entertainment. It can hardly be otherwise, and
perhaps the creative achievements of emancipated
American women in these fields will be greater
than they were in Rome.

Old Roman religion in its moral aspects seems
to have been very like American Puritanism.
There was the same simplicity, the same cult of
the home, the same strictness in sexual matters.
And under the stress of money and democracy
and contact with foreigners both religions broke
down despite the exhortations of their adherents
that change in this respect would mean the aliena-
tion of the gods, moral turpitude aiid* national
decay.

[228]

FUTURE OF THE UNITED STATES

I do not know whether the Roman women were
responsible for keeping up the Oriental religions,
the cults of Isis and Jupiter Apis, the Gnostic
and other esoteric doctrines, in the imperial
capital, but the emancipation of the sex and the
flowering of these un-Roman churches seem to
have coincided. In the United States the same
phenomenon can be studied on a larger scale.
The advertisement columns of a metropolitan
Sunday newspaper generally announce scores of
talks and gatherings based on most of the weird
cults that the world has ever known, varying from
the numerous and difficult branches of late Hindu
metaphysics to strange health cults, mystical ways
of initiation and humanitarianism. They are
mostly attended by women. That this foliage
of heterodoxy should follow the breakdown of the
old established religions in both societies at
approximately the same stage in their develop-
ment is no coincidence.

No one who has admired the vast ruins of the
Roman public baths and marvelled at the statues
of unaesthetic gladiators in the museums will
doubt tlfet* the Romans were a peculiarly clean
people and great admirers of athletic prowess.
. [ 229 ]

THIS AMERICAN WORLD

In the modem, as in the classic civilization, these
enthusiasms exist and are easily communicated
to neighbouring peoples as they come under the
metropolitan influence, resulting in a rich growth
of bath tubs, swimming pools, gymnasiums,
stadiums and championships.

4

Is America then to mn the old Roman course
from democracy to Caesarism, from Caesarism to
open empire, and from empire to downfall and
decay ? Is there no hope of an Athenian age of
culture, no possibility that men from Vermont
and Idaho will conceive poems and buildings to
equal Oedipus Rex and the Parthenon ? Can we
not hope for the establishment of democracy and
(relative) brotherhood, for the birth of new
prophets, of a new interpretation of religion
reconciling ideals and human reason within a
society that guarantees material comfort and
scientific assistance to all ? These are the ques-
tions those would like answered who love their
country to the point of preferring her dovmfall to
her ignominy.

There is no scientific answer, no mathematical

[230]

FUTURE OF THE UNITED STATES

proof of future development. But even to hazard
an intelligent guess requires a definition of attitude
toward the idea of human progress. Now what
is meant by this might be defined as biological
progress : it is not enough that individuals
should develop in wisdom and virtue from youth
to old age, or that the collective knowledge and
power of the human race continue to accumulate
with the centuries. Real progress, if it is to mean
anything, implies that with the passing of the
generations men and women with a larger endow-
ment of health, heart, brain and insight are born
into a better world. In human history such an
idea was late-conceived and revolutionary. Since
its inception and written formulation, philosophies
of history (and everybody, consciously or not, has
one) divide into two sorts : those that deny or
doubt progress and those to whom it constitutes
the meaning of life.

The older religions, whose followers are still
numbered by the hundreds of millions, lay empha-
sis upon the individual. To the Buddhist, life
is itself the evil and man’s aim is history’s extinc-
tion. fro the Roman Catholic, the important
matter is the saving of individual souls ; any

. [231]

THIS AMERICAN WORLD

merely historical circumstance is good or bad as
it furthers or retards this vital achievement.
History is therefore a secondary matter. Really
important is hagiography.

Doctrinaire pessimists deny progress and usually
base their belief on history. This is not difficult.
“ Broadly speaking, an impartial judge of human
history is ever tempted to view it as at bottom
nothing but the aimless, unending and sickening
record of human crime and folly.” Rational
agnostics are generally more cautious. Progress,
they reckon, cannot be proved. Whatever his
material triumphs, man’s moral nature seems to
have undergone no improvement since the Pyra-
mids. Human history reveals the steady repeti-
tion of egotistic and generally evil deeds. As
to whence or whither, it points no clue.

Equally opposed to the general idea of progress
is the Law of Civilization propounded by Speng-
ler and developed in his impressive masterpiece.
The Decline of the West}

Spengler grants that history repeats itself, but
not as the agnostics imagine. “ Civilization ” is

^ Oswald Spengler : Der Untergang des AhendUmdes, two
large volumes. Translated into English.

[ 232 ]

FUTURE OF THE UNITED STATES

a modem myth. Rather there are a series of
civilizations, each essentially, though not always
physically, isolated from the others, arising in
separate places, following no mathematical but
an organic cycle from birth through maturity
to decline and death or atrophy, each the incar-
nation of some specific way of grasping and
interpreting life. Spengler believes that the
records available already show the existence of
nine of these within the known period. Within
each civilization there is progress, if it can be
called such, much like the development of a
human being from birth to burial, each stage
bringing forth certain fruits which in turn are
superseded by others carrying on the fundamen-
tal vision of life that animates the whole and
differentiates it from all the other civilizations.

Thanks to this Law, Spengler has succeeded
in bringing order out of the agnostic’s chaos, in
accoimting for regressions, lapses, petrified states
like China before the ferment of new ideas began
working there, and generally, in reconciling the
obvious progress of certain societies over given
periods with the failure of the whole of history
to present any clear development at all.

. [ 233 ]

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The cycle of each civilization is fixed in dur-
ation at approximately fourteen hundred years.
The political development as type is described
by Spengler’s disciples, Goddard and Gibbons,^
as follows :

“ After a period of some centuries the civiliza-
tion proper begins with a feudal age. After
about 200-300 years, and overlapping feudalism
to some extent, comes the rise of pure aristocracy.
During a further 200 years the aristocracy gives
place to oligarchy, and about 500 years after the
beginning the true nobility decays. With their
decay the ‘ plebs ’ (middle class) begin to be of
political importance. For a brief period there
is a perfection such as can only be felt, not de-
scribed. But perfection cannot last and ulti-
mately the tiers itat becomes identical with the
nation ; the nation itself does not last long as the
form of government, and with the growth of the
fourth class (the proletariat) has to give way
to a period of disorder where at first there is
some apparent progress toward real democracy,
but the people are later used by the great men

•J. ,

^ Civilization or Civilizations, Constable. London, 1926.
I have slightly abbreviated the text quoted.

[ 234 ]

FUTURE OF THE UNITED STATES

simply for their own ends. Such forms of power
we call Caesarism (dictatorship). As the last
stage of all an empire arises and there is an
increasing tendency to rigid classification of posi-
tion and function and with it to material pros-
perity. After another 200 years the civilization
sinks back into the form in which it arose, feudal,
amorphous, but dead ! ”

Along the line of its indwelling personality,
each civilization brings forth toith plant-like
precision achievements in fields corresponding to
the stage of its organic development. Outside
the possibilities or oflf the line of their particular
civilization and moment, mortals are powerless
to produce anything of value. Art, religion,
philosophy, science, learning, develop as the
appropriate season appears and droop as it
passes, according to causes inherent in the being
of the world and inscrutable to human under-
standing.

This is not the eternal return of Nietzsche,
whereby, in an immense but recurring number
of yeai:%,*a being identical with myself will again
be seated at the same desk in the same room,

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hammering out the same words on the identical
typewriter — z view bitterly evoked by Anatole
France at the close of the Island of Penguins.
Nor does it exclude the “ individual progress ”
of reincarnating souls according to the Vedanta
and modern Theosophy. . Spengler himself rather
scoffs at progress as imagined by men to-day, and
it is evident he either disbelieves in it altogether
or considers it lies outside our scope.

Absolutely opposed to these views and this
negation of progress is the view of history as a
human adventure “ from the amoeba to the stars ”,
as evolved by certain philosophers, taken over
and confirmed by the scientists, and given excit-
ing expression in H. G. Wells’ Outline of History.
First expressed by the French priest, Bernardin
de Saint-Pierre, this idea was already influential
in the eighteenth century and was, in a curious
form, popularized by Hegel, since whom it has
become the conunon property of all not tem-
peramentally refractory to it or bound to some
definite religion. Without it the social utopias
and mechanical transformations of the nine-
teenth century would hardly have been* possible.
It is to-day the faith of most intellectual leaders

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FUTURE OF THE UNITED STATES

and of the vast masses in America and therefore
needs no further description.

Between two such fundamental views harmony
is difficult. Yet any historical forecast must
chime with the one that is favoured. If indefinite
progress, however slow, be possible, no hope for
humanity is too wild, no dream too fantastic.
If progress be limited to the single perishable
civilization, or be an illusion ; or if life be too
obscure for us and essentially meaningless ; then
good sense consists in refusal to worry and the
attempt to meet difficulties as they arise and to
solte them where possible, with the means to hand.

5

My philosophy of history is as follows :

History as it is known to me does not present
the picture of definite, regular progress that it
does to our modern reformers and progressives.
In the world of thought I see the accumulated
intellectual riches of ages but small evidence of
greater individual brain capacity. Spiritual in-
sight seems to me no more frequent than in
antiquity.* On the moral side little has changed
since the book of Ptah-Hotep was written five or

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six thousand years ago. Mankind has (in the
last century) gained in health, cleanliness and the
control of external forces, and has paid for this
advance by loss in other fields. As one who
enjoys the colour of life I am no Buddhist and the
Buddhist problem does not immediately concern
me. Nor can I believe with the Catholics in
the exclusive value of the individual soul drama.
Future life impresses me as no more important
than the one I am living. Moreover, in the
philosophy of Spengler I think to have found the
key to much that was closed to me. Therefore I
accept the Law of Civilization as the best his-
torical hypothesis available and use it to corro-
borate my empirical opinion that modern culture,
like all its predecessors, is developing steadily
towards “ old age ”.

At the same time, contemporary science is
difficult to reconcile with disbelief in all progress.
Compared with the period covered by its re-
searches, the six or seven thousand years about
which something is historically known are insig-
nificant. Though historical records give small
evidence of moral or intellectual devel<»pment in
the individual, this fact demonstrates only that

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FUTURE OF THE UNITED STATES

progress is slow, not that there is none. There-
fore I applaud the formula of Bertrand Russell :
“ The movement of human society, viewed
throughout the period known to history, is partly
cyclic, partly progressive ; it resembles a tune
played over and over again, but each time louder
and with a fuller orchestration than before ”,
and, I would add, in a different key. The figure
of history as it presents itself to me is therefore
that of an inclined but on the whole upward
tending spiral.

6

There is nothing abnormal in the condition
of the United States, The American qualities
and defects fit into the Law of Civilization with
almost glovelike smoothness. Spengler wrote
most of his great work during the War, at a time
few foresaw the overweening preponderance the
United States were soon to exert. Modified by
belief in slow but persistent progress from culture
cycle to culture cycle — ^the fuller orchestration
of Russell — ^the present status of the United States
seems to» illustrate the theory with almost dis-
concerting accuracy.

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According to Spengler, we now live in approxi-
mately the year 1027 Euro- American civil-

ization. The period between 900 and iioo
(a.d. 1800-2000) is defined as one of national
wars, finance, socialism, materialism, religious
confusion, pessimism and scepticism. Strictly
artistic and religious periods lie behind us and
nationalism is waning vmder the influence of
democracy (socialism) and capitalism. But pure
science progresses joyfully for another centmy
and the applied sciences (technique) for at least
two centuries more. Democracy and socialism
may continue to grow during the entire lifetime
of those born to-day. But by the date of their
death, about a.d. 2000, democracy will have lost
real power. Imperialistic dictators or financiers
will be gaining control of most of the globe — a
prospect that should warm the heart of many
of our contemporary bankers and admirals.

The period of open or veiled attempts at dic-
tatorship will last about a century and be followed
by a real empire, which, exercising authority over
the entire civilized area (in our case, the world),
will keep the new peace, which the future will
perhaps call the pax americana. After 200 years

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FUTURE OF THE UNITED STATES

more, decay will be so pronounced that the
whole will crumble and the remains will either
harden into essentially lifeless fragments (China
and India before the latest revival) or be absorbed
by some younger civilization,

7

From the moment it entered history the United
States have been keeping time with Spengler’s
periodicity. There is therefore good reason for
supposing they will continue to do so. Finance
and democracy, technique and science are supreme.
The United States are their champion, not
their opponent, and on this account lead the
world.

To begin with, the past is the past : Puritanism
and the “ little America ” of the thirties will
never return. The Ku Kluxers and their suc-
cessors may Cato it about the country and lay
about them with legislation and the tar brush, but
any results they may achieve will be transitory.
Protestantism opened the way to ethical rationalism
and has been superseded by it. Irrational natures
will contiifue to seek exotic and mystical cults,
whose power will increase. Catholicism has a
. [ 241 ] Q

THIS AMERICAN WORLD

future, because Catholicism is the refuge of the dis-
illusioned. As the machine age swings by, with
its hard negation of the old intimacy and free-
dom, there will be many to seek that maternal
consolation an ever more standardized and imper-
sonal world refuses.

With the multiplication of technical and admin-
istrative problems, with the foliation of physics,
chemistry, biology, hygiene and medicine, with
the increase of cities to monstrous aggregations
housing tens of millions of people in three-
storied streets and fifty-storied offices, all of
whom must be fed, there will be less personal
liberty, not more. Laissez-faire and the old
freedom to walk and talk as one likes will vanish,
at least from the chief centres, though they may
long linger in outlying nooks for the solace of
over-regimented men. The new rulers will pos-
sess more power over men’s lives than the despots
dreamed of. Whether as socialist commissars
or as capitalists, the leaders will wield almost
dictatorial might and spread the civilization ever
more widely. Political opposition will be crizshed
by as relentless (though possibly less ^ painful)
means as ever before. Anonymity and stan-

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FUTURE OF THE UNITED STA^TES

dardization will have “ normalized ” away all
but inner distinction. Outwardly identical human
beings will be individual in their own right or
not at all.

Imperialism will hold sway. There will be
wars : wars to force unwilling yellow or black
or even white men to hold by the dominant
standards. It is not unlikely that sooner or
later a nearly world-wide state wielding military
as well as economic weapons will arise to keep
the world safe for machinery and a somewhat
humdrum prosperity. For prosperity will rather
incfease than diminish. It is safe to say that a
century from now the masses may live better than
they ever have.

Not lack of shelter but homelessness will
increase. The new society will be incredibly
mobile and cosmopolitan and masses of men will
be at home in three continents. Adventurers of
all nations and colours will flock to the giant
metropolises and the half-educated, unscrupulous
opportunist will wax fat. On the other hand,
private life will gain somewhat in elasticity.
There vrtlt be still looser family and marriage
bonds and more casual relations between the

, [ 243 ]

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sexes, whereby sex will lose and not gain in
importance. Women will keep their position
beside the men, but sex acerbity will have passed.
There will be numerous attempts to check one
or more of these tendencies. Partially successful
reforms will halt the clock for a moment and be
brushed aside by the hurrying hands. Abnor-
mality of any quality will, if tactful, find easy
refuge beneath the machine-smooth surface.

Rationalism will extend to psychology and the
new discoveries may tend to justify mysticism as
inherent and valuable. But as a fact, not as an
emotion or a theory.

Saddest of all, the American intellectuals and
artists will hope in vain for a return to an epoch
favourable to them. The new period will bring
forth no centrifugal styles save the strictly utili-
tarian (and sometimes beautiful) spirit of tech-
nique. Architecture and engineering will thrive
as never before, but their triumphs will be along
lines of size and ingenuity rather than of beauty.
Pictorial art will be a fad for millionaire col-
lectors or posters illustrating ideas for the multi-
tude. Music may increase for the iflasses and
for highly educated connoisseurs ; it will not

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FUTURE OF THE UNITED STATES

mean what Mozart meant. Only prose literature,
especially critical, biographical or historical liter-
ature, may flourish exceedingly. History should
reach unimagined accuracy and extension. All
imaginable museums will provide material. Per-
haps for the first time mankind will succeed in
reconstructing a fairly complete picture of the
latest few thousand years. Some men will be
wiser, if not more creative. For in the spiritual
realms people will live on their capital.

Although no new Athens will arise, a new
Babylon may shine under the searchlights of a
thousand winged conveyances. In America are
millions of still half primitive Africans and as
many Indians as were here when Columbus
stepped ashore from the Santa Maria. Perhaps
they may sow seeds whose flowers will give
brighter colour to the larger uniform ferment
of scientific, business, industrial and social life,
and the result will be a lustrous Augustan age of
silvered culture.

This prediction does not fit American optimism
or jnsti^ the general faith in indefinite rectilinear
progress. * Nor is this future what the American
founders, or the idealists of later years, have

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dreamed. But there is time : after all, the earth
is young. And it is something to lead mankind
in the first world-wide civilization that has ever
been.

The United States as a more powerful, more
humane, more educated, more democratic and
more glorious Rome — ^this is my prediction.

8

Yet what undertaking so wretched as prophecy !

The likeness between Rome and the United
States cannot be pushed too far. In making
my forecast I have been assuming that the difter-
ences between our civilization and its predecessors
might colour but could not deflect the stream.
These differences are chiefly occasioned by the
size and type of civilization and the strictly psycho-
logical characteristics of the two peoples.

The very universality of Euro- American civiliza-
tion may preserve it from the weakness and
dangers that have brought all past cultures to
decay. Ours is the first world epoch. For the
first time a single civilization seems hkely to
spread, however thinly, over the en'fife globe.
For the first time men have attempted politically

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FUTURE OF THE UNITED STATES

to organize the planet. Such universality creates
an entirely new situation and may turn historical
development in new directions.

We possess physical power to a degree no
previous men have more than dreamed of. At
the least it should prove sufficient to ward off
those peripheral invasions that have sometimes
brought to untimely end the empires of the past.
Our cable and wireless bind the continents
together, our airplanes overawe rebellious peoples.
Knowledge of the past is ours and even, if we
wish it, knowledge of the Law in accordance
wfth which all previous civilizations seem to
have fallen. It may prove possible to evade the
Law by knowledge of the Law.

Both capitalism and democracy are stronger
than anything Rome could show. Against the
gold meshes of capital struggle the emotions of
millions and millions of human beings who
realize what they want. Education is more
general than ever before. No one can say it
will not arouse the masses to the value if not to
the* capacity of independent thought. It might
enable ^Bem successfully to hold their own in the
struggle for power. At the worst it offers a

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compass by which they can be warned in time of
the course steered by the rulers.

Not less important is the discovery of technical
machinery and its application to industry. Though
this increases the power of the State and the
machinery owners over men’s lives, the resulting
wealth has, under the democratic urge, created a
general prosperity and a degree of self conscious-
ness that will make the workers slow to accept
curtailment of their standards and privileges.
At the same time, through the necessity of keep-
ing up the consumption of the standardized wares
poured from the factories, the capitalists are
themselves forced to seek to maintain the general
buying power as an indispensable condition to
their own wealth. America cannot afford to
treat its masses in the Roman manner ; America
wastes goods but spares human beings. Our
so-called proletariat pays for its bread and cir-
cuses, its chicken dinners and moving pictures
and motor cars.

Another essential difference, also inherent in
technical industry, is the presence of a Lrge
number of highly intelligent subordinates, not
many of whom can ever be absorbed into the

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FUTURE OF THE UNITED STATES

ruling plutocratic or official classes. Imperial
Romans might drive their slaves to the fields and
galleys that formed the sources of their wealth by
a few armed guards. It is more difficult to force
electrical experts, a chemical research staff or
even journalists to do their best for a ruling order
most of them have come to hate. When all is
said, they are the class without whose willing
co-operation a highly organized country cannot
function.

Furthermore the degree of prosperity is so
great that the number of those who could, if
thdy desired, obtain both leisure and culture
already threatens to bring about a transmutation
in the conception of wealth. Where money is
so abundant and easy to obtain its importance
rather diminishes and the demands for the un-
hampered use of it in intellectual and cultural
fields increases.

Then in origin the Roman and the American
peoples were different. The Romans were an
independent branch of the same race as the
Greeks^ America is a European colony. There-
fore the*Bhropean past lives within us, while the
Romans had no past. The influx of Celtic,

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Teutonic, Iberian, Slavic, Oriental and African
merchants, charlatans and slaves reached Rome
at a later historical stage than our own immi-
grants and never became an integral part of the
Roman people. Ours are being assimilated.

•

A further important difference lies, in my
opinion, in the fundamental Christian tenets of
brotherhood and humanity that the United States
inherited from Europe and have kept reasonably
fresh. These teachings have proved powerful
enough to carry over from a pre-European
civilization and are deeply rooted in the general
consciousness. On their account alone Einro-
American civilization has a more broadly human
and merciful attitude toward human suffering
than previous cultures. Brutalization along
Roman lines may of course lead to the trans-
formation of Negro burnings, night attacks on
recalcitrant social radicals and electrocutions into
public spectacles. But it is not likely, for the
ideal of brotherhood has taken strong hold of the
human imagination. Though it requires the
seating of what the psychoanalysts calh the
“ brother complex ” on the throne of thd^ "^‘father ”
(the principle of authority), its influence, when

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FUTURE OF THE UNITED STATES

assisted by scientific sociology and vast material
means, would seem to guarantee us against the
complete dominion of dictatorial capital.

Our specific American ideas are none too favour-
able to unlimited money or despotic rule. English
Liberty insists on the free agreement of free men.
Right Will makes people unreasonably strong.
For the first time the masses are seriously study-
ing concentration and how to will. So long as
we will to be free we cannot easily be enticed
into bondage by the siren calls of the paid flautists
of financial imperialism.

T)r again, Spengler may be wrong. The Law
of Civilization may turn out to be an ingenious
illusion, patterned on a merely accidental simi-
larity between past cultures. Our resemblance
to Rome may prove transient. The adherents
of indefinite progress may find their belief justi-
fied by coming events, and the great Human
Adventure go sweeping smoothly on to ever higher
levels.

A civil or intercontinental war, ten times as
desBritftive as the recent war in Europe, may
half eflftidh educated humanity and thereby shuffle
up the cards of possession for a new deal.

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9

Yet should our civilization prove as mortal
as our bodies, and Spengler be as right as I
fear he is, not all that we have hoped and striven
for will be lost. Some of it, enclosed in the
innermost spirit that cannot perish, will be found
and utilized by men of some future cycle when
the time is ripe. “ After me cometh a builder ”
— after Euro-American civilization others will
arise, each retracing the development of its
predecessors, but bigger, bolder, freer. A new
civilization has sometimes budded within the
very heart of the old, as Byzantine- Arabian cul-
ture took root within Romanized Asia and in
Rome itself. To-day the most probable site for
such a burgeoning seems Russia, that strange
tortured country that Peter the Great failed to
westernize and that may even now, through or
in spite of communist rule, be biding its time for
the great awakening. But there is a chance for
the United States : not in my opinion for the
eastern strongholds of Europeanism and industry,
but for the west, the “ Pacific face ‘Experts
speak of evidence of a new race in California and

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FUTURE OF THE UNITED STATES

the easterner in that region feels a different
mental as well as physical atmosphere. Per-
haps there is something more than thick-headed -
ness in the suspicion of our masses towards
European culture, though it looks like the indo-
lence of the Roman mob.

And finally, should our country be swept
forward even into a development we dread or
despise, there is within most Anglo-Saxons, as
Santayana noted, “ the feeling that our labours,
even when they end in failure, contribute to some
ulterior achievement in which it is well they
shftuld be submerged ”. After all, within every
man are numerous qualities and ideals that are
mutually exclusive, and cannot all come to fruition
at the same time. Justice and mercy, tradition
and reason, prudence and daring, humility and
power, spontaneous handicraft and machine tech-
nique, youth and age — ^all are good, but no
individual and no people can ever realize all of
them at once.

Our American task is to accept our time and
within^the limits of its possibilities, to express
ourselves as fully and ideally as our powers
permit. If we do this, frankly and without

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hypocrisy, we shall at least secure passage through
the pallid vestibule of hell and accept the future
without flinching. This was the way of the
pioneers who made our country and should be
our inheritance. This was the Roman way and
we would not be less than Romans.

THE END

u

[254]

THE AMEKHJAJS UMEJS

they go in and out of motion — then you remember
the to^Ti and you understand how important it is
that steel people should have nice houses, parks^
playtime, freedom from all unnecessary anxiety.

You remember the twins and make a relation. If,
in the act of putting a million-dollar piece of me-
chanical equipment into a motion, a man were to be
seized with a panic about his twins or by a bitter
reflection on the wretchedness of their surroundings,
he might jam the works quite without meaning to
do it. Or if he had meant to do it, you would never
be able to prove it. The hand slipped — ^that was all.

Leave out the slip. There is no visible accident.
There is only the difference between a hand that
is willing, always pressing for the optimum result,
and a hand that is slack or heavy because the mind
behind it is sullen, cares nothing for the ideal out-
put, or means deliberately to retard production in
order to keep more men on the job. When by means
of mechanical equipment you have multiplied the
power of the hand a million times, so you have mul-
tiplied this difference a million times, and it becomes
enormous.

The more your investment is in machines, the
greater your stake is in the man who touches them,
in his general well-being, his manner of living, his
conscious and unconscious attitudes. You see clear-
ly what the head of the United States Steel Corpora-
tion means when he says the true problem of modern
industry is how to gain the loyalty, the cooperation
and the understanding of the individual man. Not
men in general — ^the man. And there is new mean-

[ 52 ]